Five Years In: Tight Living Revisited

 

                Last days of winter…daffodils trying to pop a bloom but not quite able…spring is just around the climatic corner… if the groundhog can be believed. This morning I sat in my recliner listening to the quiet hiss of the natural gas burning in the artificial logs of the little stove next to my recliner and enjoyed its warmth as I mused how I would spend this last day of probably the last cold snap of winter.  My second cup of coffee for the morning sat on the stand beside my recliner, an afghan covered my legs and a half-finished hand of solitaire  lay on a tray on my lap…I looked out the window on the opposite side of the room. Framed within that curtained window frame was an amazing variety of birds in the woods…male and female cardinals, robins, chickadees, Downey woodpeckers and a single lost rabbit hopping beneath...all harbingers of spring. There is a certain serenity in bird watching from the warmth of a cozy room…a sense that “life is good.”

                It has been five years now, since I began my retirement. I was scared then…would Social security be enough to meet my weekly and monthly financial needs?  Was I certain I would not outlive my money? Would my health needs be taken care of? Could I survive runaway inflation...what about deflation and recession?   Would my wife be adequately taken care of after I died? Had I figured all the angles and variables, the worst case scenarios …or was I missing some really obvious pitfall? Around the time of my retirement I wrote a short book on the topics of retirement and frugality entitled Tight Living for Tough Times: A Frugal Retiree’s Guide to Thrift. In honesty, the book was as much a blueprint for my own retirement and a salve for my own worries as it was a guide for others to follow.  Everything has not gone exactly according to plan…does it ever?  There was the Great Recession, (I didn’t see that coming!), a couple bouts with cancer (a bit of a surprise!) and, as with many families during the  recession, we had a close relative move back in with us for a bit until she could get back on her feet. But in the great statistical bell curve of life, there were deviations to both sides of the plan. Unplanned shortfalls were offset by unexpected windfalls.  I am writing this present blog to report that retirement has been considerably easier than I had expected. I have gotten into a frugal retirement routine. My budget and schedule are laid-back second nature to me now and yes, “life is good.”

                I want to return to the topics of Tight Living for Tough Times because there is a universality to the themes and subject matter of that book. Everyone is going to grow older. Most people are going to retire. Most people need to be frugal and to be concerned about budgeting. And most people worry about all the aforementioned. I am no thinker, just an average Joe…but since I feel the subject matter is both important and universal; I want to write a few postscripts and insights about my retirement experiences.

                When it comes to living well in retirement on little more than a monthly Social Security check, there is an awful lot of wisdom and insight in some old adages.  For starters,(1) have everything paid off. Social Security stretches so much farther if there is no monthly mortgage payment or rent or car payment. If you are debt free, then social security can all be funneled into the monthly utility bill, gasoline, groceries, good medical coverage and a little entertainment.  In addition to having the house and car paid off, you should have both in good repair and know how to do routine maintenance. A paid off retirement bungalow or cottage is better than a mansion that is eating you alive.

 

(2) Live in an area with a low cost-of-living. It is amazing how much the cost-of-living varies around the nation! My property taxes are very minimal. If the same acreage and home were in a county that abuts ours, my property tax would be ten times more because that county has a medium-sized city whose infrastructure and school systems must be supported by property taxes. In the city there is a monthly bill for trash pickup, and a water and sewage bill. I have a great well for water, a septic system, and I haul a pickup load of trash and recyclables three miles to the free county collection site once or twice a month. We have an excellent tarmac country highway that runs across the front of our property. By the way, our county school systems are first rate.  Probably the best retirement low- cost- of-living area would be in a small rural town. Such communities are friendly, have a number of churches, either a main street or town square, libraries, low crime and hardly any industry. If there is anything I want to do or see in the city, I just drive in.

(3) Live within your means. Someone once defined a life of happiness and a life of misery as follows:

Happiness: income $100; expenses $99.

Misery: income $100; expenses $ 101.

Don’t overspend in retirement; budget so that social security is greater than your expenses. There are hucksters who are going to try to sell us expensive things that we don’t really need to be happy. Let’s compare the value and enjoyment we could get from a Caribbean cruise with the value and enjoyment from a stay at a state inn in Indiana or Kentucky. Both the inns and the cruise have good food in romantic settings. A cruise ship has a deck to walk around on and lots…lots of people. A state inn has a state park for nature walks and not too many people. A cruise ship has a pool and waterslides and spas. A state park has an indoor pool and hot tub in winter and an outdoor Olympic pool in summer. A cruise has a tourist-trap island to visit; a state inn usually has a nearby tourist-trap town to visit. You will most likely fly to your cruise departure port; you will most likely drive to the state inn. Mid-week state inn winter   rates run about $100 for two night stays. Would we really be that much more relaxed and happy from taking a cruise?

(4) Small is beautiful; more is not necessarily better. Even if you are debt free in retirement and own your home, you still have to heat that house. Utility bills are going to be part of your retirement expenses.  It is a lot cheaper to heat 1,000 square feet than 3,000 square feet, especially if the latter has cathedral ceilings. In winter I spend most of my time in our living room.  It has comfortable recliners and a sofa, a good library of encyclopedias and gardening books, a good DVD/VCR collection, and a flat screen TV. Here I can watch old TV comedies or PBS documentaries, write my few words of wisdom or surf the internet, listen to music, play solitaire, work crossword puzzles, bird watch out a window or if I’m really energetic do a few shallow knee bends. Did I forget to mention winter hibernation naps on the sofa? I do most of my cold weather indoor living in my living room. I mentioned earlier the small natural gas stove which keeps the living room cozy ; it also prevents the thermostat from kicking on  the central heating system and heating the entire house. Enough heat flows naturally from the living room to warm the kitchen but the rest of the house stays cool. There is no blower on the stove so unlike the central furnace it doesn’t use or need electricity. If a winter blizzard or ice storm knocks out the electric grid, we still have heat. So I really think small is beautiful; I’ve reduced my small house to the single room where I spend most of my winter indoor hours. I should state that we had our stove professionally installed and we do have a carbon monoxide monitor just to be safe.

                More is not better. Don’t become a hoarder; don’t let possessions own you instead of you owning them. It takes a lot of time and money to maintain and store unneeded equipment, so we have kept it simple. I knew a retiree hoarder who built or bought three storage barns to store possessions he never used.  Too many boats, motor homes, vehicles etc. will drain your income with unnecessary outlays for licensing, maintenance, storage and most importantly insurance. None of these “things” are cheap when you buy them either, even if you get a bargain. With the passage of time it all becomes outdated and worthless. Keep retirement clean and life simple.

                (5)Everyone needs a hobby. This is especially true for a retiree.  For me, a hobby is a job which you love to do; when you wake up in the morning, you can’t wait to get started.  You should also be able to take rest breaks whenever you like and for as long as you please. If after you have worked for ten minutes, you want to sit under a shade tree for fifteen minutes, that’s fine.  Your work day should be as long or short as you choose.  For a frugal retiree a hobby should also either make or save him money rather than be an expenditure.  One person may tinker with small engine repair and resell used lawnmowers; another may choose wood crafting.  My personal passion has been sustainable organic gardening. It is good exercise and challenging both mentally and physically. Also it is a conversation starter and gives me something to talk and think about. My wife loves to cook. Her father was an excellent cook and she follows in his footsteps. With these two complimentary hobbies, gardening and cooking, we are able to reduce our weekly grocery expenditures and have fun.

                What I have written and suggested using these old adages, is a method for reducing expenses so a retiree can “make it” on Social Security and assuring that those considering retirement do not need to be frightened by the prospect of financial considerations. I have tried to verbally attack one budget expense after another. With the first paragraph I tried to eliminate the mortgage payment, the car payment and interest payments from the retirement budget. With the discussion of “living in a low-cost-of-living” area, I tried to show how property taxes and municipal utility bills could be reduced or eliminated. In the “live within your means” topic, I discussed how entertainment expenses should be kept reasonable. In the “small is beautiful; more is not better” section I discussed reducing heating bills and insurance. In “everyone needs a hobby” I discussed how my wife and I used our hobbies to reduce our grocery bill. I have been purposely whittling away at one budget item after another until we can live an enjoyable retirement on Social Security while living within our means. Sharpen your budget pencil and you can do the same.

                No need to worry. A well ordered poverty is a wonderful lifestyle…less stressful and complex than the “middle class” existence we are all taught to aspire to. The simple life can be the good life.

 

Garden Menu

 

                An intelligent young man and I were having a discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of vegetable gardening. “Diversity”…he said, “I prefer buying in the market because I get a lot more variety in foods.” Obviously it is true there is more variety in the grocery store than in my small 30’X60’ vegetable plot. Food in the super market comes from other sides of the country, the other hemisphere, and other continents…although I’m not sure all that extra transportation cost is worth the extra “diversity” to the palate. I have never been opposed to agriculture/farming and world trade as plan A; I just like having horticulture/gardening as my back-up plan B. A small garden does not provide as much variety as the market but I feel it does provide “enough” variety…a surprising amount of variety. Too many people picture a gardener as growing a dozen or so vegetables; a rube eating a raw turnip or carrot and saying “Mmm, that’s good! I’m a vegetarian!” The truth is those dozen or so vegetables are only the raw material inputs into a finished product.  In fairness, one should consider whether a garden provides enough cuisine variety in the form of final product i.e. finished meals. With that idea in mind I will present what comes from my garden as items on a restaurant menu. This is what we actually eat in my household.

Salads:

Combination lettuce, spinach, chard, radish, onion, beet, bell pepper salads with store-bought salad dressing of choice;

Cole slaw from grated turnips and carrots with sugar/vinegar and mayo dressing;

Onion, cucumber and tomatoes marinated in sweet vinegar;

Onion and pickled beet salad;

German and American style potato salads with onions and green peppers.

Soups:

Beef vegetable soup with carrots, onions, potatoes or turnips, green beans, and corn;

Butternut squash soup;

Beet borsht;

Potato and corn chowder.

Plate lunch side dishes (served with store bought meat entre):

Sweet potatoes or white potatoes served mashed, baked, as French fries or hash browns;

Sweet corn, green beans, cooked carrots, boiled asparagus tips;

Cooked greens (turnip or chard) or wilted spinach with sweet vinegar and bacon bits;

Fried green tomatoes or fried zucchini;

Yellow summer squash casserole or green bean casserole.

Desserts:

Melon: cantaloupe, (watermelon, if the size of garden is doubled to allow for a watermelon patch);

Pies: rhubarb pie (tastes like very tart apple pie);

          Butternut squash pie (tastes like pumpkin pie);

          Sweet potato pie;

          Raspberry cobbler.

Sweet breads: various types of zucchini bread (tastes like cakes, especially chocolate zucchini bread.)

               

                 Not a bad menu! We do not have to eat only what is “in season” since much of our produce either keeps well naturally (especially the root crops) or freezes easily.  It is now mid-February and we have sweet corn, green beans, asparagus ,sliced green peppers, rhubarb,  and zucchini in the freezer  as well as several boxes of sweet potatoes  in the back room. We ate carrots from the garden until the beginning of this month. So there is much more good eating in a small garden than one might expect; especially if you are blessed with a spouse who likes to cook and has a library of cook books.

Creeping Rasberries on the Isle of Crap

                Actually, this blog is about chickens and fruit trees…but first let me explain the blog title. It all began with the cacti. When I began retirement these invasive plants had established themselves on much of my sandy property. Herbicides could not penetrate their tough hides and if I cut them up with a mower or tiller each piece put down roots and became a new cactus…more trouble than “tribbles” on the Starship Enterprise. I decided the most natural method of ridding my property of this nuisance was deep shade where they at least seemed to struggle. I found a small clump of trees just behind my garden and began dumping wheelbarrow loads on top of wheelbarrow loads. I thought the cacti on top would at least smother out those on the bottom. Soon I began adding other noxious weeds to the pile…crab grass and two kinds of sand burrs. These further smothered the shaded cacti. This pile of “crap”…super invasive weeds that I did not want anywhere on my property, especially not in my vegetable or flower gardens, soon became a huge natural compost pile. As the pile rose among those trees it reminded me of palm trees on a tropical island…so I began calling it the isle of crap.

                After several years of composting, this soil became the deepest, most fertile and organic I had anywhere but considering what went into the compost I was not about to put any of it into my garden. Still, it would be a shame for it to go to waste. I had planted black raspberries and a few blackberries just outside the fence around my vegetable garden. The fence was to keep rabbits out of the garden but also to serve as a trellis for the brambles to grow against. There is also an apple tree just outside the garden on the southwest side and neither the berries outside the fence nor the rhubarb on the garden side seemed to mind a little afternoon shade. But black raspberries and blackberries “walk”; they went over the fence and planted their tips inside the garden. Bramble fruits are as invasive as weeds but that makes them the easiest of fruits to transplant and grow.

                I cut the limbs from the trees on the island as high as I could reach to let in more light and moved some of rich soil from the north side to the south side. I dug up or pulled the raspberry plants that had invaded the garden and planted them in the rich cacti and sandbur compost… making lemonade from life’s lemons. I’m certain we will get many berries from the new patch and even if the weeds in the compost do come back, the raspberries will tower over and shade them.

                So, what does this have to do with fruit trees and chickens? Fruit trees are step up in difficulty over growing vegetables and berries. Raising small livestock is a HUGE step up in degree of difficulty over maintaining a vegetable garden. You must wait a number of years for fruit trees to begin producing; you must spray fruit trees; you must prune fruit trees.  And then the birds may still ruin all your fruit and the yellow bellied sap suckers peck the tree trunks full of holes. If you really want fruit trees, think it through first and get dwarf or semi-dwarf trees. Plant the trees far enough away from the garden so that their roots and shade will not invade the vegetable plot. If you buy standard trees, most of the fruit will be too high for you to pick and after it falls on the ground it will only be good for the compost pile.

                And what about chickens for self-sufficiency in eggs and meat? Can you go off and leave livestock for a week like you can a well mulched garden? Even if they are free range, won’t you still have to buy some commercial feed? That feed will eventually draw mice and rats…so you will need cats and dogs to take care of the vermin. But dogs love to kill chickens even more than they do rats. Chickens love to cross the road so some hens will get squashed. Why did the chicken cross the road? Answer…to cause a car wreck and get you sued. Free range doesn’t sound so good anymore…better to invest in a coup and fenced-in chicken yard. That means more commercial feed expenditures. It also means the hens will peck each other more. Do you have children or grandchildren? Roosters are mean. We once gave a rooster to an elderly woman only to find out by way of the grapevine that she got angry after it attacked her so she blew it away with a shotgun. So again if you want to raise small livestock, think it through very carefully.

                To my way of thinking a small vegetable garden and a melon patch give a great deal of self-sufficiency with much less headache. But, you say, what about those great pies and desserts you will be missing out on without any fruit trees? The garden can give you strawberries, cantaloupes and watermelons, rhubarb pie (tastes like tart apple) butternut squash pie (tastes like pumpkin), sweet potato pie (tastes like pecan pie), zucchini sweet breads  (tastes like cake) and last but not least those raspberry and blackberry cobblers (taste great with vanilla ice cream). Isn’t just a plain old vegetable garden enough self-sufficiency? Don’t spread yourself too thin.

               

Chickweeds and Old Leaves

                Here it is, Ash Wednesday in February; a late-season light snow is falling outside.  Here I am, trying to live the good retirement life… the simple, frugal life on a few acres in the country. Starting in February I knew it would be time to spend more time outside …I needed the fresh air, the sunshine, and I needed some exercise to gradually tone up after a couple months of holiday feasting and lounging in the living room next to the fire, reading  seed catalogues and gardening how-to books.

                I began the month by dragging tree limbs downed by heavy January winds and snows up onto a burn pile. Once burned, I will spread the ashes onto those garden areas which will require potash and lime, especially where I’ll plant cantaloupe, Crenshaw, corn, winter squash, cabbage and other sweet- soil loving plants.

                I felt that if I could start some compost piles in the beginning of February, maybe I could have partially finished compost to mulch with by late June.  There were lots of leaves that I had stored from last autumn, so I had plenty of “brown” or carbon-rich material, but what could I use for the “green” or nitrogen –rich material needed to make compost? There was some daily garbage (peels, rinds, coffee grounds, etc.) but that would not be nearly enough. There was also the cover crop of rye grass growing on the ground where I would plant my early vegetables. I could skim off the ryegrass along with a little topsoil for incubator microbes and layer that on top of the six-inch layers of well-wetted brown leaves. Still that was not enough green material to reach the 50-50 ratio I needed between brown and green materials to make compost.

                Chickweed is nature’s winter cover crop, at least in our area of southern Indiana. It grows an inch to three inches deep and is an indication of good soil. Chickweed doesn’t grow out in our cultivated field but is rampant in the woods where the soil has been enriched by falling leaves.  Chickweed is really cold hardy; it is a neat sight in January to see all that green ground cover back in the woods. Some people consider chickweed a winter wild salad green but based on my reading, I do not think it is quite safe for that use. Apparently though, as its name implies, chickens love it for winter fare and it is healthy for them. With a sharp hoe, chickweed peels off the soil like wool being sheared off a sheep. So to make a long-winded story shorter, I covered my six-inch layers of leaves with six-inch layers of chickweeds.  I like the idea that this process is all integrated and self-sustainable since all the material comes from right here on my property. Only time will tell if it makes a good batch of compost by summer.

                In our locale, Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day are the traditional planting times for garden salad greens and peas. I have lettuce and spinach seed planted and will add radishes soon, but I’m not a pea fan, preferring the green beans in my freezer instead.  I’ve raked the leaf mulch off the asparagus so maybe we will have sprouts in a month. As far as the February garden calendar goes, I need to start leeks, seeded-onions, and cabbage plants in trays on the front porch so I can transplant outdoors in March.  Mostly I’m out digging a little in the garden each good-weather day, making beds for the early crops which will be planted in March, (early potatoes, carrots, beets, chard, onions etc.)  Anyway I’m getting a few hours of exercise and sun most days, no gym or tanning spa required.

Winter Roots, Tubers and Bulbs

                Succession planting is one of the most consequential concepts in increasing the output of a small garden and in achieving some degree of food self-sufficiency. Equally important is “succession eating” which would include both eating what is in season and planning for storage crops to eat when the weather is cold and the garden is less productive. My first attempt at practicing this year-round succession eating was growing white potatoes, (any fool can grow a spud) to provide a healthy carbohydrate from July through Thanksgiving and then growing sweet potatoes (one of the few vegetables easier to grow than a spud) to provide a healthy carbohydrate from Thanksgiving until early potatoes came in again. I planted my white potatoes really early…around St. Patty’s Day in mid March. That is mainly because my soil is sandy and I knew the mid-summer drought would play havoc with my garden in July and August. Mostly I tried to have two succession gardens, a pre-drought crop and a post-drought crop. That idea served me really well with last summer’s extreme drought. Sweet potatoes are drought hardy; they grew all summer long and still produced a very respectable crop just before frost. In the end, we had both enough white and sweet potatoes for ourselves and still some extra to give quite a bit away; that always makes an old retiree feel good.

                In addition to these basic two year-round eating crops, I considered growing other storage “roots, tubers and bulbs.” Not being a botanist, I think of all three of these as being roots. First my wife informed me that she wanted some onions to go with those Yukon Gold potatoes. So we planted several pounds of onion sets very early in the spring...in early March when I planted the lettuce and spinach. Through spring and early summer as I weeded and thinned the onions to four inches apart, we used the thinnings as scallions to eat until the onion tops finally dried and fell over just as the summer drought hit and then we had cured onions the rest of the summer. I did a poor job of curing the onions, so none kept into the fall. I planted a row of beets; and they also matured and did very well before the drought. Some Borsht soup went into the freezer. Borsht is basically a stew where potatoes are replaced with beets.

                Towards the end of August (and toward the end of the normal drought season), I planted turnips and carrots and began experimenting with fall gardening. I should have put in some beets for winter storage, but I just didn’t get around to it. Besides, I think my cook does not appreciate the “bloodiness” of red beets so in the future I will need to switch to golden beets. I have often read how productive and easy to care for fall gardens are, so I wanted to move up to this next level of gardening and give it a try.  What I found was that once cool and wetter weather came about mid-September, there was a drop off of weed growth and insect attacks. But when I first planted the seed and the new plants sprouted in August, there was a necessity to frequently water and cultivate and hand pick pests. That first month was tough going. The turnips were very fast maturing and ready to pull in October. Raw turnips have that strong “cabbage” or Cole taste which people either hate or love. Fortunately, most of that flavor cooks or fries out of it so that in a soup or hash browns you barely taste it. In a stew it is difficult to tell a cooked turnip from a potato. Rutabagas are even more indistinguishable. Because of the white cabbage butterflies which outnumber all other moths and butterflies by a billion to one, I have to date had no luck growing cabbages. These pests also sometimes lay their cabbage looper eggs on turnips leaves, but they don’t bother the root. By peeling and grating turnips and then adding mayo and sweet vinegar, I can have Cole slaw all winter long. Actually it doesn’t have to be mayonnaise; any salad dressing will give its own distinctive slaw. I usually also grate a carrot into the slaw.

                I find it amazing that a thousand-dollar refrigerator doesn’t keep root crops nearly as well as a five gallon bucket of damp sand in an unheated garage or a cool back room. Carrots (and parsnips which I have not yet grown but will next year) don’t even need a bucket of sand.  This year I allowed my fall carrots to grow undisturbed until nighttime temps fell into the teens in mid December and then I took black bags full of leaves and set them on top the carrot rows. Today is January 23rd and we are suffering through the tail end of an arctic blast, but I can still go out to the garden, move a leaf bag and pick carrots from unfrozen sandy soil.

                The carrots are very sweet and along with the Yukon Gold potatoes are my wife’s favorites. I have had some spectacular failures to this point trying to grow carrots in the springtime. Carrots are slow to germinate while weeds are quick, so a carrot row ends up being a weed patch. I planted just a few radishes in the carrot row to show me where the rows were so that I could hoe-cultivate the weed sprouts between rows. That still leaves weeds in the row and I am not a down-on-my-knees weeder-gardener. I have a bad back and bad knees so weeding and thinning are my least favorite part of gardening. My solutions to these problems are a lawn chair and a scissors. As I sit in the lawn chair, a row of carrots runs right between my legs and between the four chair legs. My body weight forces the chair into the sand so that the seat is right at carrot top. I can lean forward in the chair to use the scissors to snip out weeds and unwanted carrots. After doing about 3 feet of row, I stand up and move the chair back down the row. This works for me for weeding and thinning carrots, turnips, beets, lettuce, spinach, chard etc.

                Most people do not like doing easy crossword puzzles; most people prefer the “challenging” crossword puzzles.  Similarly I enjoy “pushing the envelope” in my small garden because doing so is both a challenge and a learning opportunity. So I will probably fool with a “soup and salad” fall garden next year too. I think a winter garden may even be possible here in zone 6 in a wind-protected, sandy garden. I hope to plant leeks this year so I can harvest them in winter. (And not have to mess with curing onions). Rutabagas, carrots, and parsnips all stand a chance of making it through the winter if mulched in the garden. Numerous salad greens are winter hardy although my preference would be spinach and Swiss chard. I think it would be really cool to harvest garden produce in the dead of winter. Cool?...Downright FRIGID!