Monthly Archives: June 2022

Cutting project costs by building with pallets

frugal strategies, homemaking, homeschooling

I started looking at ads to buy goats, then realized I better get a pen built first so that I didn’t create unnecessary stress for myself by finding the kind of goats I wanted but not having a place to keep them. So my husband stepped in as the overseer of that building project while a couple of our boys did the building.

I had been planning a certain kind of pen, but when I saw how expensive the goats are, was inspired to offset those costs by finding more frugal options for building the pen. I settled on using pallets, which are a good source of free wood, but they come with the not insignificant effort of dissembling them. For the pen design itself, we decided to minimize our work and use whole pallets, mostly avoiding the need to take them apart (the door is the exception).

Building with whole pallets has its challenges; since the pallets aren’t identical there’s extra time and effort involved so that the end result doesn’t look haphazard. Ds16 and ds14 worked together to get the main pen built; my only physical input was to redirect some passionfruit vines from along our fence to the area above the pen. Passionfruit grows quickly and my intention is for them to is that they will eventually cover the top of the pen, providing shade as well as making it look more visually appealing.

Building the door did require wood of a specific size, so ds14 found a method that is very effective in breaking them apart – though he makes it look easy he quickly developed blisters on his hand and I felt tired just watching him. That young man has a huge work ethic and a lot of stamina! Once he took the pallets apart, he built the door and now all that’s remaining to add is a lock.

Though doing your own projects is less expensive than paying someone, building materials nonetheless add up quickly. Ds14 and ds20 discovered this for themselves last year when they co-purchased geese and building materials for a pen. I suggested to them that they consider using recycled wood, but they didn’t think it was worth the effort. They spent 1500 shekels on a wooden frame, chicken wire and screws, and soon experienced for themselves how fast the expenses added up. Later when they decided to end the goose experiment, ds14 decided to switch over to chickens and wanted to add a chicken run. He chose to use recycled materials; almost doubling the space but spent only 100 – 200 shekels more).

Independent of cost considerations, I very much like reusing and recycling. It’s gratifying for me to find a way to use what I already have or what already exists rather than get something new.

About using pallets – it’s important to know that they have different codes printed on the pallet that indicate how the wood was treated. Sometimes dangerous chemicals are used and those pallets marked as such should be avoided for a project like this. We chose pallets that were untreated or heat treated. To see a list of the symbols and what they stand for, check out this site.

My husband gets the credit for shlepping the pallets home. Talk about a good attitude – he did it smilingly and told me he appreciated the chance to get a physical work out loading and unloading them (so far he’s brought home 25 pallets!). Next on the list of pallet projects is a hay feeder, milking stand and outdoor stairs.

Avivah

Thinking about getting milk goats – am I crazy?!?

homemaking, nutrition

Over the last couple of years my son told me he really wanted to get goats, and I adamantly and repeatedly told him, “No, we don’t have enough room,” and offered rabbits as an option. He agreed but that wasn’t what he wanted and after a year gave them away.

In the meantime, he has helped friends take care of their goats and learned to milk them.

For the last few months I’ve been noting how much space owners set aside for two or three goats, and it’s less than I thought was necessary. I spent a long time thinking about if I was willing to change the look of my yard to make room for two milk goats and a pen for them. I started to slowly find the idea more doable and acceptable.

Until recently, I had hoped we could rent or buy some land adjoining us. One person was willing to lease us the entire plot of five dunam but only for a year and for five times the going price for agricultural land. The other didn’t want to lease or sell any land. The thought behind having more land was so we could raise some animals and practice permaculture principles to rebuild the completely depleted chemically farmed soil, and develop some kind of food forest. That would mean investing in fencing and many other significant start up expenses, that we wouldn’t be willing to do without a long term lease.

I realized if I scaled down my vision, I could do some of those things in my yard right now. But it means giving up – to some degree – the kind of ‘pretty’ yard I’ve spent time developing.

Why would I want goats? Seventeen years ago I learned about the incredible nutritional benefits of raw milk, and since then have thought how amazing it would be to have our own source of milk. In the US, I traveled every month or two to Pennsylvania, where I bought raw milk directly from a Mennonite farmer, twenty plus gallons at a time.

When I moved to Yavneel, I was able to buy raw goats milk from a local family and was thrilled to let someone else raise the goats and for me to have the benefits. My daughter and I bought all that they had. However, the supply became irregular and then petered out completely.

Healing our very broken industrialized food system begins with supporting local farmers, and there’s nothing more local than producing food yourself! Though milk hasn’t been an important part of our diets since we left the US, when I thought about what would be the best use of our very limited space to raise some of our own food, milk kept coming up as the top option. (Eggs would have been number one, but my son is already raising chickens.)

This is NOT a frugal undertaking. From a strictly economics perspective, it doesn’t save money but this goes beyond money for us, since we see it as an investment in our health. If we had our own raw milk, it would replace other less nutritious things that we currently eat.

So what are the costs involved in getting milk goats?

First is buying the goats – and the costs have gone up quite a bit in the months since we began thinking about this. A good milk goat costs between 1800 – 2000 shekels each. (I asked the goat broker why they’re more expensive than a few months ago, and he said, “Gas has gone up, food has gone up, meat has gone up – why wouldn’t the cost of goats go up?!”) You can buy young female kids for 700 – 1000 shekels but then have to feed them and breed them and wean the babies before you get milk, which costs plenty of time and money.

Then there’s the issue of buying hay. We’re in a shmita year, and can’t buy hay that is currently being grown. There is literally a hay field opposite my house, and a few days ago I watched him bale the hay and stack the bales, thinking how easy and convenient it would be if I could run over to the tractor driver and ask him to drop a bale over the wall into my yard – but I can’t buy any of it. Everyone who had animals who was concerned about shmita issues knew to pre-buy hay for the upcoming year. There’s no hay that I know of available for purchase left from last year – several months ago we found one person who had a few small bales who told us to call him back in a week, since he was out of town. When we called back, he had already sold the non-shmita hay to someone else.

When my son bought his purebred barred Plymouth Rock chickens from a Circassian woman a couple of months ago, I asked her for her hay supplier. I’m allowed to buy hay from a non-Jew, since he’s not violating any Torah laws by growing hay during shmita. She gave me a number, but when I called him, he said he’s no longer selling privately, and all of his hay is now sold directly to a broker. He had no suggestions of anyone else I could speak to.

We have to ask a rav if we’re allowed to feed animals hay that was grown as heter mechira, because that’s what most Jewish farmers have relied on.

Then there’s the cost of animal feed that is going through the roof. You can’t save costs by pre-buying feed, because after a couple of months the weevil eggs inside the grains hatch, multiply, infest the batch and the feed gets ruined.

And of course, we need to be able to house them, and in addition to the pen need a hay feeder and a milking stand – all of which costs more money.

Despite all the costs and logistical challenges, I’m still seriously considering goats. Does that sound crazy?

Avivah

How to celebrate our 30th anniversary?

marriage

Five years ago, we had just married off our oldest son and ten days later celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary. Our oldest daughter was determined that we would do something nice to celebrate, and organized a very special weekend away for us.

She made arrangements to take care of everything for almost three days while we were gone. Then we arrived at the very nice vacation rental she reserved, the first thing we saw on the table was a beautifully wrapped printed canvas of the two of us with ’25 years’ printed at the bottom.

She made arrangements the first night for us to go out to dinner at a very nice meat restaurant, and while we were out, delivered by taxi all the food she cooked for us for Shabbos. It was incredibly thoughtful and generous, and our parents and other children chipped in towards the costs. It was very special.

Today is our thirtieth anniversary, and yesterday my husband and I were talking about what we could do to celebrate. We don’t do regular date nights or anniversary dinners, though we do regularly take time to spend together. We enjoy time in nature but it’s so hot now that an extended outdoor outing doesn’t sound fun to me. I don’t like being where the crowds are, since it distracts me from the person I want to spend time with and that’s not relaxing for me. For now that doesn’t leave a lot of options!

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Here’s my new favorite spot – we moved the couches out of the living room to make room for all the family members who were here for the bar mitzva, and I was so pleased with the location of one of them on our side patio that I left it there. I love laying there and looking at the sky, the palm trees swaying in the breeze, and the grapes ripening on the vines as they grow over the pergola.

My new favorite spot

Since I feel content being at home, I don’t really feel a pull to get away. We’re blessed that my husband now goes into the office just one day a week, so we get to see one another throughout the day – briefly but that’s still significant. Our youngest two boys are in school, and the two teens who are homeschooled are often busy and out of the house. So we have a nice amount of quiet time together, and it’s nice not to be desperate for a break or time away – unlike most of the years we’ve been married!

At the same time, we both have experienced and appreciate the value of extended intentional focused time together. Uninterrupted time to talk about goals, life direction, vision and just connecting at a deeper level than the shorter exchanges of day to day life allow for, have been so valuable for us.

A friend once offered us the use of a family member’s beachfront apartment if we ever wanted to go away for Shabbos, and I’m seriously thinking of taking her up on it. But that’s a location we would enjoy much more off-season than right now. For now we’re thinking of a mini-getaway during the hours the younger boys are at school.

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Lately I’ve been aware of some inner shifting of focus, of recognizing that time is passing, and being married for three decades contributes to that. Thirty years is a long time, you know?

While a person has a core self that stays remarkably consistent in many ways throughout a lifetime, I’ve changed a lot over these years, and so has my husband. Continuing to make time to talk and connect is really important in not just staying together, but in growing together.

Avivah

When life gives you lemons, make lots of lemon juice!

canning, frugal strategies

This week I got a windfall of lemons, and decided to process them immediately. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of my produce being left in a bag and put away somewhere outside of the fridge by a zealous child wanting to quickly clean up, and by the time I find it it’s no longer usable. So I decided to seize the moment. 🙂

Fortunately, my food processor has a juicer attachment. I bought this food processor about five years ago because the owner told me with the high demands I make of my machine, I would burn out the motor of smaller and less expensive machines. It’s a good machine and has served me well, and the juicer attachment makes a project like this very doable.

Ds9 saw what I was doing and asked to help, so I put him to work.

At some point ds5 wanted ds9 to join him in the pool, so he went to swim. We have a gated pool in the backyard for our vacation apartment, and this year I considered having just one pool, to simplify maintenance and cut costs. But I decided against the seemingly more frugal option. Having a second pool on the front patio right outside the kitchen window means I can easily keep an eye on them when cooking and makes it possible for them to spend significantly more time swimming than if I had to leave everything to sit with them in the back. They come home tired and irritable from school, and being able to spend so much time in the pool makes our afternoons much more relaxed and enjoyable for everyone.

In from swimming and ready to help some more!

Ds9 juicing lemons, with the overflowing pan of juiced lemons and container of leftover pulp in the background.

Ds5 wanted a turn, too!

The inexpensive lemon juice I buy at the store is actually watered down citric acid. This fresh lemon juice is delicious – a bit sweet and very flavorful.

Though the juicer attachment strains out most of the pulp, tiny white seeds still go through. When preserving lemon juice by canning, these little seeds can make the finished result bitter. I learned this with my disappointing experiment canning mandarin oranges earlier this year. They were so sweet and tasty eaten fresh, but once I canned them, they were bitter and unappealing – the pith left on them had caused the flavor to change. I opened all the jars of mandarins, turned them into jam and reprocessed them, but honestly they probably are wasting shelf space because we have yet to touch them.

That experience inspired me to be more careful with the little things that don’t seem so important. We used the pulp that came from our second sieving to make lemonade – with the addition of some water and maple syrup, it made a nice drink for a hot day.

This time, the experiment turned out great! Lemon juiced is a high acidity product, so it can be preserved using the water bath canning method. There are two ways to do it, by pouring the juice into the jars hot or cold. If you choose to do the hot pack method, the jars have to be hot before placing hot juice in them, and you then place the jars directly into boiling water. This can be a time savings because you can boil the water while you’re doing something else, but I prefer the cold pack method because there are fewer steps.

After filling the jars with the unheated strained juice, we placed them into a large stockpot. I have a rack for the bottom of mine, but if you don’t you can put a thin towel or washcloth on the bottom so it doesn’t bang around and crack once the water boils.

Cover the jars with about an inch of water, then put the lid on and bring it to a boil. Once the water is boiling, you begin the processing time – in this case, fifteen minutes for quart sized jars. When the time is up, take the jars out and put them on a towel covering the counter – again, this is to protect the jars from cracking.

The preserved lemon juice changed color a bit (I’m guessing if I did hot pack that it wouldn’t have changed as much), but the flavor is excellent. As you can see, even after straining it a second time, there was still pulp left that rose to the top once I processed it. I wasn’t worried about straining out all the pulp – if I was, I would have used a finer sieve. I just shake it before using and it’s all good.

We ended up with a bit over eleven liters of lemon juice.

The finished product, along with the three lemons I left unjuiced so I can use them for salads.

As far as the financial savings – if I compared the cost to eleven liters of the watered down citric acid, making my own saved just 44 shekels. If I compare it to the cost of real lemon juice, it saved much more – over 150 shekels.

That leaves the question, is it worth it to spend the time on this? With my helpers it took about ninety minutes to make the juice. It would have been faster by myself but I consider it a gain when I can double up on the things I want to do and spend time with my children, so I didn’t mind the time spent. I would have had to be available to them during that time in any case.

Now, this equation works because I enjoy activities like this, and I like ending up with a quality product. If I didn’t, this might have felt like drudgery and not worth the time and energy spent.

Avivah

Chicks, chicks, galore!

homeschooling

Last year my now fourteen year old son tried incubating eggs (quail, duck and chicken) in an incubator owned by someone else. There were multiple failures – power outages, chicks that got stuck in the netting….there were so many disappointments.

This year, he decided to build his own incubator. He salvaged a small refrigerator for the housing and traveled to Haifa to purchase a thermostat from a private seller. Then he put them together, rigged it with electricity and got it up and running.

While he was busy setting this up, one of his hens was doing her own incubating, and hatched some chicks!

A couple of his hens

A week later my son hatched out the first six chicks in his incubator, and then a week later another 25. In the week before the bar mitzva there were another twenty or so, and then a few days ago another 25. I’ve gotten used to the peeping sounds of newly hatched chicks coming from his bedroom. 🙂

A few days old

He also built an outdoor cage with a heat lamp, to keep them warm and safe until they’re big enough to keep themselves warm. So far the results have been exactly the opposite of last year – his chicks are doing great.

One of his purebred Plymouth Barred Rock chicks, 1 month old.

His plan is to sell as many chicks as he can. If some aren’t sold, he’ll keep the hens as future layers to increase our personal egg production. I’d love to have enough homegrown eggs to meet our egg intake, but we’re far from that now. We use a lot of eggs! And of course as of late he’s been saving the eggs to incubate, so we haven’t been eating any.

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The same son asked me to drive him to the feed store to get chick starter. They had no chick feed in stock, which was unusual but he was told they’d have some in a week. While we were there, he got more feed for his adult chickens, and after paying told me he was glad the price hadn’t gone up too much. I suggested he figure out how much it went up by percentages; once he did he realized there had been a 20% increase.

We went back a week later. Still no chick starter. Once we were there, he decided to get some feed corn and wheat for his adult chickens – the price of the corn has gone up almost 150% since the last time he bought some! That is a crazy increase and obviously will affect the costs of the eggs/meat being raised – not just for us but chickens raised on any scale. Finally after a month they got the chick starter back in stock, so he got enough to last for a while.

During this waiting period, he did some research to learn about what baby chicks need to eat, and learned how to make his own chick feed. (He’s already experimented with fermenting the feed for adult chickens, which makes it much more nutritious and cuts the cost quite a bit.) Chicks don’t eat the same thing as adult chickens; they need a different blend of nutrients. Since they need a lot of protein, he did an experiment in growing his own protein for his chickens, which was very interesting and successful!

Now that he’s able buy the starter, he’s not growing protein for them but it was a good thing to learn and know he could do.

He made his first chick sale a couple of week ago, and it was gratifying for us all to see him getting a return after all of the work and time he’s invested. Right now he has about eighty chicks that are a few weeks old, including the four chicks who run all over with their mother. He has another hen sitting on a clutch of eggs, so in a couple of weeks he should have some more chicks. (The chicks raised by their mothers are not for sale.)

The chicks with a bracelet on the leg are the purebreeds; the yellow one in the foreground is a mix. One month old.

He has a theory that chicks hatched by hens will as adults have the instinct to be broody (sit on their own eggs). He’s doing an experiment to see if that’s accurate. He’s purchased two purebred hens, which supposedly have had the instinct to sit on their eggs bred out of them. Certainly his purebred hens don’t sit on their eggs. He’s switched out some of the non-purebred eggs that are under the broody hen with some purebred eggs, since he hopes to hatch purebred chicks that will grow up to be broody when they reach the laying stage. It will take months to see if this theory is accurate, but it’s a worthwhile experiment.

Enjoying browsing in the yard

While all of these chicks might sound noisy and messy, it’s not at all. My son rotates different batches of chicks so that as they get older, they are able to spend the day running around outside. It’s restful and entertaining to watch them; they add a nice energy to the yard area.

Avivah

How to give without becoming resentful

personal development

Over Shavuos I was rereading a book that I find meaningful and inspiring, Emuna with Love and Chicken Soup: Henny Machlis, the Brooklyn-born girl who became a Jerusalem legend. Rebbetzin Machlis was an incredible person with a heart filled with love and concern for others who did hospitality and other acts of kindness on a legendary level. She had clarity about her role and mission, and she accomplished amazing things during her life of just 57 years.

Inspired by my reading, over the holiday we were discussing the idea of doing more open-hearted hosting of guests. I have a need for privacy and personal space that makes it a challenge for me to embrace more than a fraction of Henny’s level of giving, but each person can increase their good deeds in their own way and that’s what I was thinking about. Though I’ve done a lot of hosting over the years (and still regularly have guests), it’s not an area I feel inspired to invest more efforts into.

It’s not hard to give if you receive profuse thanks for your efforts. However, how can you give without feeling resentment when your efforts don’t receive recognition, or are taken for granted? I was thinking a lot about this, because when something is hard for me I need more positive feedback to offset that. Then something happened that helped me find my answer to this.

That same day we had this conversation about hosting, I was asked to visit with a mother of a new baby who wasn’t feeling well. After I left, I thought about how to help this mother, and my first thoughts were to find bigger solutions. But I’m not the source of bigger solutions, so it left me feeling useless.

Then I thought it would be better to think what I could do to help that would fit into my schedule and match my giving capacity at this time. I can’t offer to take care of a bunch of small children at my home, or go there to babysit for an extended period. So what could I do?

I have a 45 minute window for 7:15 – 8 am after my kids go on their van to school, before I get busy with my tasks for the day. So I knocked at their door and told her husband I had 45 minutes to help with post-holiday clean up.

Since they’re a much smaller family than mine, their dishes are a drop in the bucket for me! In the time I had, I was able to wash the dishes, clean the counters and sweep the floor.

On my way out, I noticed the laundry hamper was full and took it home with me. I have a big washing machine and enjoy doing laundry, so that’s easy for me.

The mother was sleeping after being up for hours in the night with her sick baby, so she didn’t see me when I was there. We happened to bump into each other at the health clinic later that morning, and she thanked me for the lovely surprise of waking up to a clean kitchen.

Since I did tasks that were doable for me, I didn’t need the approbation and appreciation I would have needed if I had done something that was a big stretch. I felt good about my actions but there was nothing that I did that felt hard or noble, that I would be constantly telling myself how amazing I am for doing these incredible acts of kindness or feel frustrated that my kindnesses weren’t adequately noticed.

All of my initial thoughts about how to help felt hard for me. My lesson to myself is to do the things that are a fit with who I am and the resources I have available. If it feels like too much, chances are that’s not the right thing for me to do at this time. It’s better to extend one’s self with something smaller and be able to help again in the future, than to burn oneself out and feel frustrated/hostile/resentful by taking on something too big.

As far as big things, if a person starts small and works up, over time his capacity for giving grows and later on those big things become doable to him. It’s undeniable that Rebbetzin Machlis continually grew her capacity for giving. Something I really appreciated about her biography is that the focus wasn’t on, ‘look how amazing this person is’, but on how she became the person she became. And that’s actually inspiring, because then there are steps a person can take to become a better person himself.

Avivah