On frugality, freezers and foraged fruit

So I jumped on an Instagram trend earlier this week, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

After my experience of social media burnout last year, I made a commitment not to jump on trends just for the sake of it. I did one of those “kind of rich” posts. They’ve been around for a while now, especially in the slow living, homesteading corners of Instagram. But this one genuinely caught me and resonates with how I’m experiencing life at the moment.

Like many, we’ve been paying much closer attention to where our money is going, how quickly it moves (and how easily it disappears!) Groceries creeping up, fuel, all the small things adding up. I’ve been leaning more consciously into a way of living that could be described as intentional frugality.

I’ve always liked that word.

Frugal. Not tight. Not restrictive. Just attentive.

There’s something in it that feels grounded rather than deprived. And there’s something about engaging with it that has unlocked a feeling of abundance that I haven’t felt in a long time. While we have always lived a pretty modest life – we definitely aren’t into consumer culture, I am finding deep satisfaction in noticing the places where we can make our resources stretch a little further.

But the part that sits underneath it all, which is certainly less Instagram-shiny is that this kind of life isn’t effortless.

It takes time.
It takes systems.
It takes a level of safety (and privilege) to hold it.

And I’m also very aware that our version of “less” still holds more than enough and that structural privilege plays a huge role in this. We have housing security, land, time and flexibility. I’m very aware that not everyone begins this kind of life from the same place, and many of the choices I’m writing about here simply aren’t available to everyone. These are simply the practices that we are currently engaging with that feel really good.

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Trading locally. I’ve started using a local harvest/grow/swap group to trade what we have in excess for what we haven’t managed to grow. At the moment, we’ve got a proper stash of butternut pumpkins and tromboncinos in the pantry – mostly traded, some gifted. It’s far more satisfying than just buying them.

Foraging and processing. Rodolfo has always been very good at this. Staying up late, doing the monotonous work of brushing off saffron milk caps, slicing and dehydrating them. Washing blackberries and turning them into jam. Coming home with roadside fruit and stewing it down. His foraged plum ice cream…yummmm!

Library. There’s something magic about the reservation list. The delayed gratification of it. I’d love to say the books arrive slowly, one at a time, but they absolutely don’t. I’ve just picked up five books that have all landed at once after months of waiting, and I don’t know how I’m meant to read them all in three weeks, let alone decide where to start.

Scrap fabric and clothing. This one comes naturally to me of course, given that quilting is my trade. There’s a lot more time involved in turning scraps into something wearable, rather than using meterage. But there’s also nothing like transforming scraps into a garment – a wearable quilt!

Mending. It’s just part of life. TBH, I don’t even enjoy it, but I can do it, and it matters. I’ve got a rule for myself: before I start anything new, I mend a few things from the basket. I’ve also completely surrendered to the fact that, like laundry, there will never be an empty basket. The idea of discarding something simply because I can’t be bothered or don’t really enjoy mending it feels totally absurd. I can muscle through 20mins of uninspiring stitching.  

Bread. I’m so late to this one, I know. I made a Sophie Hansen overnight focaccia a couple of weekends ago and immediately went out and bought a 12.5kg bag of organic baker’s flour. Since then: more focaccia, plus a sourdough starter from a friend and a lesson in how to use it. It’s a steep learning curve, but what a saving by just making some of our household bread. I currently have some sourdough burger buns proofing on the bench. The irony is, I don’t even really eat bread, but the rest of the family do.

Second freezer. A huge game changer for us has been buying a (secondhand) upright freezer, which lives outside. It’s made bulk meat buying possible – wild venison and whole organic chickens. We’ll spend an evening breaking everything down into cuts, with all the bones set aside for broth. The financial saving in doing this is huge!

Stock. The stock we’re making now is seriously good. There’s now a permanent freezer bag of veggie scraps in the inside freezer (for easy access). I’ve always found homemade stock to be pretty bland until we learned the secret (that apparently everyone, except us, already knew!) of roasting the bones first!

Eating seasonally. I don’t mean this in a romantic or health-focussed way, purely pragmatic. Sweet potatoes are about three times the price of pumpkins, so we just aren’t buying them at the moment. We haven’t actually bought fruit yet this year. We’re eating what we’ve foraged, what comes out of the garden and from friend’s gardens. This has meant no bananas at all, a few weeks of plums, then peaches, our neighbour’s passionfruit, our nashis then pears until they were all gone (except what we preserved!). At the moment our fruit bowl contains feijoas, figs and the last lot of apples. Soon there will be pomegranates and persimmons, then all the citrus, then we’ll get through the bottled fruit. I’m sure we’ll buy bits here and there from our local organic store and we’re grateful to have that option, but for the time being its’ been very exciting to see how far we can go without buying. And the weirdest thing – the kids haven’t complained at all.

Compost. Rodolfo has become the master of our compost bins, in turning them and getting the carbon/nitrogen balance just right so it transforms into black, crumbly gold. At the moment we have about six black compost bins (mostly picked up over the years from hard rubbish!) which we rotate through. But we have grand plans to build a three bay compost system (out of old timber from the renovation) and find a second-hand mulcher so we can process much larger quantities of garden waste and prunings from the garden. It’s one of those things that with a bit of time and infrastructure we will be able to close our waste loop even further. Slowly, slowly.

The garden. I’ve always grown veggies pretty seasonally, with winter being mostly cover crops, broad beans and leafy greens. This year I’m trying to broaden that – to focus more on every day staples. Potatoes, onions, garlic, brassicas, peas, beetroot. Not in huge quantities, but enough that they start to form the backbone of our garden, with the seasonal things sitting around them rather than being the main event. Pray for the beetroot and brassicas though – they’re really not rising to the occasion.

So I suppose that’s what I was really trying to get at with that little Instagram trend. Not that our life is somehow effortlessly wholesome and simple. Quite the opposite, really. Most of what I’ve written about here is slow, often tedious, sometimes inconvenient, and almost always messy. But I’m realising more and more that many of the moments that feel rich in our life don’t sit apart from all of that effort. They’re born from it – the systems, the routines, the invisible labour, the partnership, the slow accumulation of skills that over time begin to feel less like effort and more like rhythm. Maybe that’s the part Instagram rarely shows. And maybe that’s what “kind of rich” really means to me right now. Not having more. Not even necessarily needing less. Just learning, slowly, how to notice, tend, and work with what’s already here.