Frugal or just being smug...have you scored a real deal recently?

Robert Ray wrote:I scored another greenhouse. A commercial greenhouse that had ben used at a local WalMart 20x60 with all the side and center shelving. It needs a new skin but that's ok. 26k new picked it up for 2k.

Wow! a 20'X60'. Those aren't cheap! I need to get a new skin for a tiny tent under which I store... all kinds of not-used-for-winter stuff. I have to measure the outside skin, which is what got ripped in the last windstorm.
I remember buying a large tarp made of big advertising panels like they use on the billboards but I can't remember where I got it. What was nice is that you can ask for grommets along the edges and if you want it hemmed, they can do that too. [Essentially, they are repurposing tarp billboards.] These things are really thick, but not transparent, so I'm not sure how it would work. It's kinda nice to see where you are going in the dark...

I live in farming country, surrounded by field crops (corn, beans, peas, wheat, potatoes. buckwheat and lots of orchards, so there 's a whole lot of gleening to keep my freeze dryer going.

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:

Kath Thomas wrote:Not only that Pearl but here in Bulgaria  people still forage and glean to ensure that theres more on the table. In the UK I'd pick nettles to make soup  seen as odd behaviour there, here that's a common practice,  fruit  and nut trees seem to line the roads in and out of the village which people take full advantage of. Here " make do and mend" isnt a hobby but a way of life. Which suits me.

Yep. Gleaning is a practice that unfortunately is disappearing, although if you ask a farmer nicely, they will usually tell you which field to go to and let you glean. When I have enough aronias, and elderberries I invite my friend to come pick up the rest.
2 years ago after the late picking for the potato season, I asked the farmer close to me if I could pick. He said yes. I had so many potatoes [4 big sacks - I could barely carry them out of the field!] that I gave 3 to the local pantry and gave them the tip: If you have a friend with a car/truck, that's free food.
(Now, I wasn't so happy because this farmer does tend to put some chemicals on his crops... I discovered later)
Maybe that's why gleaning is disappearing. This said, it is amazing the amount of potatoes that stay in the field. He said that "just for these few potatoes, it isn't worth the tractor and truck time to do a second picking over the same field. [They also squish quite a few with the truck that follows the tractor]
When we lived in the Alps, in France, mom would send us in the woods and along the roads right after a rain: there were big escargots. Mom would put them in flour for 24 hours: It took care of the slime. Also, when we took them out of the flour box, they had pooped all the green disgusting stuff and were full of flour. So they were already stuffed. [With a lot of butter and parsley, they were delicious... and free].
We also foraged for parasol mushrooms [Macrolepiota procera]. Over there, they grew really big and I have wonderful memories of my sister laughing and I using them as umbrellas. [Yep, they were THAT big]. My sister took to drying them in the sun. Those were really good. In Central Wisconsin, they are so few and so tiny they are barely worth the trouble.
I think that my mother's generation, which suffered hunger taught us to make the most of what comes our way, and I really appreciate her  teachings.

We found this little beauty sitting by the bins when we went to down a couple of months ago.



My son needed a tool box, so we grabbed a handle each, picked it up, and carried it right back to the van!

NICE score.

This is a score my partner made, actually. We were driving  90-minutes out of a city we'd had to visit,  through a "middle of nowhere" stretch — British Columbia has a lot of those, through which some fairly major & well-kept highways run. There are a lot of pine forests along this one, some of them burned over by wildfires if recent summers.

There's a little second-had store in one spot, and they manage to collect a lot of things from an extensive but thinly populated area. For the most part it's knick-knacks, old junky paperback novels, overly common kitchen tools of a poorer quality, etc. But my partner has a keen eye. She spotted a tied bundle of fabric, about the size of an old-fashioned bread box. She asked the lone deskminder what it was, and the reply was flannel sheets. How much? $10.

She pawed at it a bit, and the sheets' fabric looked good. So she paid the $10. When we unfolded the bundle at home, it turned out to be fitted double-bed size sheets, in perfect condition... L.L. Bean brand. Online, the Canadian price was $200. (For10 bucks!)

Excellent scrounge! And FWIW don't feel bad that you might have ripped off the thrift shop or anything like that. I know managers of several charity thrift shops, and they receive 10x more stuff than they can display and sell; most of it is sorted and shipped elsewhere. I am confident that they appreciate your $10 in hard cash to support their causes and pay the bills.

My local recycling centre has a take-it-or-leave-it corner, and over the last few months I pulled half a dozen kitchen knives out of there. Frankly, someone is cleaning out Granny's house and passing things along to others -- that's life. These blades are not junk, either: German and Japanese steel of decent quality, but needing a great deal of TLC to bring them back to life. And I guess they found the right guy who is happy to do that. And when I'm done, I will start passing them along to neighbours who confess they have junk knives. This is all very silly i guess, but it gives me a warm glow.

Love it.

It's funny, how many deals one can come across because others don't know it's a deal.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:My local recycling centre has a take-it-or-leave-it corner, and over the last few months I pulled half a dozen kitchen knives out of there. Frankly, someone is cleaning out Granny's house and passing things along to others -- that's life. These blades are not junk, either: German and Japanese steel of decent quality, but needing a great deal of TLC to bring them back to life. And I guess they found the right guy who is happy to do that. And when I'm done, I will start passing them along to neighbours who confess they have junk knives. This is all very silly i guess, but it gives me a warm glow.

I guess I'm a Romantic fool, but I like the idea that Granny's old knives (for which she no doubt scrimped and saved) might be passed along to people who will appreciate them. I am just the intermediary, bridging the generational web with the skillful application of a little industrial diamond.

I was just running out of wood chips and scheming about where to get more…

Day before yesterday I kept hearing chainsaw noise all day. I went outside and found an arborist cutting and chipping a tree just across the road. Turns out our neighbor didn’t want those wood chips, so the arborist drove his dump truck over at the end of the day and dumped a ton (literally) of chips in our yard. And he started talking to my husband (who is a mechanic, at the moment) and offered him some side work. All for the price of walking across the road and introducing myself.

I’m so excited. And I’m so glad I married someone who gets just as excited as I do about miraculous coincidences and wood chip piles.

My husband went down to visit his parents last weekend, and they were clearing out a few things. They thought I might like their old coffee grinder as surplus to requirements....

Awesome! I think it'll be excellent for grinding my grains (if I get any to grow that is!)

I bow [very low] to you.....

I'd love that in my kitchen, even if I never used it.

Did score one of the big wheel wheat grinder's years ago for about thirty (and sold it ten years later for a few hundred), but, pretty as it was, it in no way is as purty as this.

Nancy, that is INCREDIBLE!! Utterly GORGEOUS!! Congratulations!

Nancy Reading wrote:My husband went down to visit his parents last weekend, and they were clearing out a few things. They thought I might like their old coffee grinder as surplus to requirements....
Awesome! I think it'll be excellent for grinding my grains (if I get any to grow that is!)

Oh, Nancy!. I am so jealous! right now, I am also looking for a manual meat grinder. I have an great electric one, but to grind one bologna, I don't want to get it dirty for just that. I used to have one. He kept it in the divorce.

A local guy was moving, he had a lot of tools he was letting go of. This NAPA 6v/12v auto-battery charger was one. I believe he was hanging onto another similar one. Anyhow, with this charger he'd cut the clamps off, and put a wood-engraving tool end on it instead. He'd just been using it as a DC power source. He gave it to me at no charge.

I brought it home, tested it for output, and it was fine. All I've needed to do was remove the wood-engraver tool, and put new clamps on the output wires. It's still a little dusty, but hey that can be dealt with. LOL

A new one, same make and capacity, sells for $90 or more in my region!

I scored 4 Ball Fermentation Starter kits for $1.51 each today. I bought every one they had to give one away as a gift. Originally (and still on Amazon today) these were selling for between $15 - $18 ea and I was not willing to pay that, but it still did not stop me from wanting one. Now I have more than one! Yay!  This was found at Ace Hardware.