This is part one of a four-part series on busting through the excuses for not homesteading so you can live more sustainably. Let’s dig in. “Oh, I’d love to homestead, but I DON’T KNOW HOW.” Oh, honey. This is a terrible excuse for missing out on some real personal satisfaction. Remember when you learned to tie your shoes? At one point in your life, you did not even know how to tie your shoes. So you watched someone else do it every morning. Then you decided you WANTED TO LEARN HOW to tie…
Author: Erica Burton
I'm just a regular old girl with big dreams of doing awesome things with what I have.
Do Just One Easy Thing To Save $60 This Year
Do you want to save $60.00 this year? Make your own liquid laundry detergent. It’s easy, cheap and fast! You don’t need any special equipment. I’ll tell you how I wash clothes for 2.3 cents per load. There are 3 Ingredients: Borax, Washing Soda (Not Baking Soda!), and Dawn or Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid (the handwashing kind, not for dishwashers, & get the good stuff.) You can buy these on Amazon, but it’s going to be way cheaper at the Wal-Mart. Here’s the Nuts ‘N’ Bolts of how we calculated the savings. Check…
Baby Chicks on Burton Farm – August 2016
It’s Your Birthday, Little Chickens! Twelve babies were born this week (so far!) We did lose one early on, but the other baby chicks appear to be doing great. Some are pure Dominickers, but others are a mix of Dominicker and Copper Maran (Amigo). What color eggs will those chickens lay? There was a cricket in the coop, so Rocky threw it toward the mama, but it wasn’t long before one of the babies was running off with a cricket leg in its mouth. They’re a fast learning bunch, this…
Net Worth & Debt Payoff Progress through July 31, 2016
So, I’m thrilled to tell you this: We have paid off 1.47% of our debt! We have reached a full percentage point GONE. When we do this ten times, it’s 14.7% gone. I’m celebrating this small win for the following reasons: We finally STARTED tracking our money. We committed to getting out of debt completely. For each of three months, I have seen our debt decrease. I want to encourage you in your debt recovery journey. No debt load is too big to overcome. And every reduction in debt counts. You bring about what…
How to Delight Your Chickens by Re-Purposing Junk
Entertain your chickens for free! You likely have a lot of this stuff already (or can find it on the side of the street any given weekend) to be re-purposed into your very own chicken carnival. Yeah! Take the girls to a carnival! So, naturally, when you arrive, you, as the responsible adult, will be analyzing all the activities at the carnival to make sure you and your girls hit all the important attractions with minimal inconvenience. Everyone’s so excited, aren’t they? So while you’re passing by the ticket booth,…
How to Build a Budget in 7 Easy Steps
Want to take a sweet trip to Venice to ride a gondola guided by a singing gondolier in traditional Italian garb in five years? Maybe you want to retire a millionaire long before you hit minimum retirement age? Want to adopt a child in four years, but $20,000 is a lot of money and you don’t know where you are going to come up with it? Have you visualized yourself at the exact moment you are out of debt? What does it feel like? What does it smell like? All of…
How to Get on With Life When You’re in Debt
Let’s talk Debt for a minute. Dirty, Dirty Debt. Debt makes you feel all kinds of negative things– shame, fear, anger, hopelessness, guilt, regret. You just wish it was gone, over, paid in full. Every day seems like a struggle just to make ends meet. Every day you regret buying that two-seater that will be taking your fun-money for the next six years. It’s going to take 6 months to pay this diamond off, two years to pay off that credit card, five years to pay that medical debt. I feel you. I’ll be…
One Rocking Marigold: Garden Update 7/17/16
I am marigold growing genius superstar! Just kidding. Kind of. All right, so recently, I told you how I had been completely unsuccessful with my marigold-from-seed attempt (uhhh-gain!), but this week one finally flowered. I let my fingers do some walking over the interwebs and found I’d been doing marigolds wrong. Today, I’m admitting my faults and promising a new day for marigolds on Burton Farm! How I’m remedying what I’ve been doing wrong with my marigolds: Because marigold seeds are so feathery and paper thin, I have always scattered…
It Never Seems to Rain on the Mountain
It was supposed to rain yesterday. The weatherman had been promising “rain on Saturday” all week. After a hot, dry day with the boys, I figured it wasn’t coming. I screwed the hoses back together, pulled the heavy out to the garden and noticed for the first time the heavy, dark rain clouds overhead. “Nope,” I thought. I’m already out here now, so it’s getting watered. I started watering the garden. It needed the water yesterday. I bet my neighbors (if either of them see me) will think I’m nuts.…
Net Worth & Debt Payoff Progress – June 30, 2016
Oh, June. June. June, June, June. So glad you’re gone. I’m reminded of those “Black Eyed Peas” lyrics, “Let’s get ignorant. Let’s get hectic,” except it wasn’t nearly as fun as they suggest. I knew I shouldn’t have told you how much life sucked there for a minute, because you know what? After I hit “post,” lousy things kept happening: Prime example: While I was investigating an on-the-job accident, I dropped my phone, shattering the screen. I put packing tape on it to keep the shards from falling out. It’s not an…