Tag Archives: Save money

Musings

Saving Seeds and Saving Money

Save money by saving seeds? Absolutely!

This has been such a strange winter, it can’t seem to make up it’s mind. In a single day it might shine, snow, shine, rain, shine, then throw a windstorm tantrum. Honestly, I can’t wait until spring.
Seed Library
Dreaming of springtime and growing things, I thought it might be fun to talk about seeds. I recently purchased this gorgeous spice rack and repurposed it for storing my garden seeds.
Isn’t it pretty?

It also taught me something that I hadn’t considered before… I might be hoarding more seeds than I need. Like, a LOT more seeds.
The reason I’m bringing it up in this post, is because I think a lot of homesteaders struggle with how to make a little extra money to cover things like phone bills and fuel for the truck.

A small package of seeds can cost anything from $1 to $5 depending on the rarity of the seeds in question, and a single jar of seeds in my library could probably fill hundreds of packages.
Seed LibraryMore if they’re small seeds, like lettuce or onion. (Note: please make sure none of the seeds you want to sell are trademarked, copyrighted, or branded against resale).

A year or so ago, I packaged up some of the purple orach and hollyhock seeds, just to see how well they might sell. I marketed them on just a single group in Facebook and made over $500 in just a month. Yes, that meant I had to make weekly trips to the post office, but I simply scheduled them with shopping trips to save gas.

It’s not a fortune, and eventually you’d run out of seeds, but I thought it might give you ideas for how even small gardens can help pay for themselves and give you a little extra cash.

<- celestehall.com

Musings

Unlimited Free Trees

Aspen Runner Okay, so here’s a challenge for you. A healthy forest should have forty to sixty trees per acre and include a rich tapestry of biodiversity. So, I’d need about five hundred trees to transform a high desert, ten acre wasteland, into my dream property. That’s a lot of trees!
There’s absolutely no way I could afford to pay nursery prices for that many trees, so I started looking into alternative sources, like online companies. I did manage to pick up a few tiny, bareroot trees which survived shipment and the first few weeks in their new environment, but that taught me how much I needed to focus on trees grown closer to my location which were already adapted to our environment.
The answer hit me when I noticed that my neighbor’s aspen trees had sent up almost a dozen runners in my side yard. After a quick look around, I discovered that I also had elm, sycamore, locust, and crabapples growing up from seeds in the little nooks and crannies that I couldn’t reach with a lawn mower.
In a normal year I would have chopped these seedlings down and added them to the mulch pile because they were not in places they could be allowed to grow, such as too close to buildings or in places where their roots might eventually damage water or power lines. And that got me thinking, how many other people were out there chopping down saplings in their yard right now? Saplings which I, and others, would pay good money for at a nursery?
Now that was a sad thought!
So, I put a few tentative feelers out on Facebook to see if any of my local friends might have saplings sprouting up in their yard which I could come collect. The response was overwhelming. You would not believe how many people just mowed right over their saplings like I’d been doing!
All of these saplings were growing in the USDA zone that I needed and could be carefully moved with some, if not all, of their root ball intact, greatly reducing the time it took for bareroot trees to adapt to new growing conditions. Not only that, but they were free! As many free trees, grown in my area, that I could desire, and all I had to do was dig them up.
Now, would you like to hear the best part? You can do it too! Just put some feelers out there asking neighbors and friends. I bet you’ll be just as surprised as I was!