I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Last year I planted hollyhock seeds that a neighbor gave me, and this year they are starting to bloom.
Hollyhocks are biennials; they complete their life cycles in two years. In the first year, they produce a cluster of large leaves. In the second, you’ll see tall stalks of flowers. Then they’ll produce seeds that drop and start anew.
This means if you want blooms every year you need to sow seeds yourself two years in a row.
I told my mom about my hollyhocks, and she said, “Oh I always thought of them as weeds, because they grew in the alleys when I was a child.” She also told me that theyused to make hollyhock dolls, which I looked up on YouTube:
Weeds they may be, but I am thrilled to have such impressive statement plants at the back of my front flower bed, and for free too!
I’m naturally frugal, and growing plants from seeds, especially seeds that were gifted, really thrills me.
Sometimes I think I would have liked to live as a frontierswoman on the prairie, like Laura Ingalls and her mother and father. They couldn’t immediately turn to Amazon when they wanted or needed something. When she were little, Laura didn’t even get a real doll. From Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in the Little House on the Prairie series:
Mary was bigger than Laura, and she had a rag doll named Nettie. Laura had only a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, but it was a good doll. It was named Susan. It wasn’t Susan’s fault that she was only a corncob. Sometimes Mary let Laura hold Nettie, but she did it only when Susan couldn’t see.
The hollyhock dolls made me think of Susan the corncob doll, and how sometimes making do is more fun than buying something new. Though I imagine Laura Ingalls would have preferred a real doll to her corncob.
Frugality in practice
I held a graduation party at my house yesterday after my youngest child’s graduation with her master’s degree. I bought 1.5 liter bottles of wine for it because they were so cheap I couldn’t stop myself. It would have been more tasteful to buy regular-sized bottles of wine. But the wine in the big bottles tastes pretty much like the wine in the smaller bottles, at least at the price points I shop.
My dad’s girlfriend said, “those bottles remind me of when I was in grad school!” Perhaps it was appropriate as my daughter was completing a graduate degree.
Frugality sometimes gives you better results than not being cheap. Every morning I run around the house and open all the windows then turn on my attic fan, as long as the temperature in the house is higher than the temperature outside. Cooling the house with fresh air makes for a much more pleasant climate than using air conditioning round the clock. I’m glad the former owner of my house had the foresight to put in that attic fan.
I like to shop at Goodwill for some items of clothing, for housewares, and for towels. I found my favorite two hoodies at Goodwill for under ten dollars a piece. They happen to each be Columbia brand, and of a style and size that really suits me I think. I couldn’t have done better with new items. Yes, a lot of stuff at Goodwill is haggard and crappy, but you can find good deals, and what a rush when you succeed.
From free hollyhocks to the dolls they can make to cheap Columbia hoodies, frugality is fun!