Ask Lemmy

I’m pretty broke and have been for most of my life, so I’m pretty willing to be inconvenienced. Only thing I have to my name is a very old house in need of substantial work I can’t afford to do, on a very small town lot, and a car that’s falling apart.

I keep my heat set to 60f/15.6c at most, which is well outside of my comfort zone (I prefer being too warm over too cold). I use heated mattress pads/blankets to make it bearable, as they cost exceptionally little to use round the clock for a month, around a dollar a month vs the several hundred per month my heat goes up when kept to a comfortable temp.

I grow as much of my own food as I can. I know people do the math and determine that home grown somehow costs just as much as store bought, so it’s only good as a hobby, and I genuinely don’t understand that calculation. I compost and mix compost into my garden soil and my food is basically free..? And I recently added a small flock of chickens that eat my plant scraps and food scraps, and their waste is great fertilizer. It’s a nice holistic system. I also have some plants like tomatoes and peppers that grow year-round in hydroponics, the small amount of electric and powder nutrients used to grow them costs far less than the food they produce. I’m working on expanding my hydro options to sell surplus to friends and family.

I use compressed sawdust pellets (like for pellet stoves or horse bedding) as cat litter. It’s basically the same thing as feline pine but it’s $7 for 40lbs, which is enough to completely toss and replace the litter about 10 times per bag, more in summer because I use less (takes longer to dry out so needs to be replaced faster anyway). The litter is compostable, so it goes into a special pile that gets used as yard/flower garden dirt. However this requires that I stir up the litter at least twice a day, to allow the urine to dry properly. Else it just reeks of ammonia.

All food scraps, whether cat food or human food, get saved for something. Scraps my chickens can’t/won’t eat, like raw carrots, onions, garlic, and celery, get turned into broth along with bones. After being turned into broth, the remaining material goes into my worm compost. Anything chivkens can eat, especially cat food my cats don’t eat, gets saved for them. Egg shells get saved (by everyone who gets eggs from me) and used as calcium supplement for them.

If I can build or make something, even poorly, I’ll do that before buying a thing (beer, bread, covey coop, chicken coop, shelves, etc.). If I can repurpose existing tools to do a thing I only need to do once, I probably will even if the task is far more frustrating as a result. I desperately wish we had tool library here so I could just borrow stuff. But no. And on this same sort of trajectory; I’ll do things manually rather than using gas or buying new tools. I inherited a ton of really high quality hand tools from my grandfather, and I use them quite a lot. I also shovel snow by hand rather than putting gas in my snowblower, unless we are expecting a blizzard.

I have more but this is already too long so ima just stop.