Category: Life on the Farm

This page holds a collection of our real-life farm fables. Some stories hold valuable advice, and others are just for fun.

February 5, 2016

Finding My Frugal Farmer in Spain

Finding Love and Farming Joy in Spain

Greetings, my frugal friends! Today we’re featuring a fun and heart-warming post from life coach Lisa Hoashi. Lisa shares about the hard work and also the inevitable joys of living life on a working farm. Her words will bring a smile to your face and warmth to your heart. Enjoy!

How I Met the Love of My Life

I didn’t set out to find love. Truly.

The reason why I quit my job and gave away most of my possessions was because I’d long had the dream to travel for at least a year, unfettered and carefree. Sure, as I talked about my plans with my other single friends, they often looked at me with a twinkle in their eye. “You’ll be sure to meet someone when you’re traveling,” they said. Read more

January 11, 2016

The Frugal Farmer 2016 Goals

2016 Goals

Setting goals is something I do personally and we do as a family every single year. Usually, I look forward to these goal-setting session with great anticipation. This year, not so much. It’s been an exhausting year here from a personal standpoint, and although we are praising God that we came through the many bumps in the road that we experienced with success, I’m Just. Plain Tired. Although I can’t share all of the details of our hurdles, they were intense to say the least.

Have you ever had a year like that? No need to share the details, it’s just that, in spite of the many tribulations I’ve experienced in my life (see more on that here, here and here) I’ve usually come out with a victorious attitude. This year I just feel kind of like I escaped certain destruction by the skin of my nose and I’m darn worn out. Read more

December 10, 2015

My Favorite Things: Gift Ideas for the Holiday Season

Great Holiday Gift Ideas for Everyone

As Christmas nears the corner and Hanukkah is in full swing, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite things for your holiday gift-giving list. Here at the Frugal Farmer household, we’re not much in favor of the “popular” gifts but prefer classics that will stay on your list of things to enjoy for a long time to come, so here they are. Check out the list and see if there’s anything below that might bring a smile to the recipients on your gift-giving list. Read more

November 30, 2015

Is Organic Food Better?

Is organic food really worth the cost?

There’s much debate in the world about whether or not organic food is better for you, and whether or not it’s worth the expense. As someone who’s been experimenting on and off with organic and non-organic food for nearly two decades, I’ve watched documentaries, read books and researched findings on both sides of the aisle: those in favor of organic, and those who say it’s a waste of money.

There are those out there who say that organic eating is a marketing scheme and a complete waste of cash, and those out there who insist we’ll die an early death if we choose to eat primarily non-organic food. Personally, I think that a balance can be found. I think that there is absolutely a place for organic foods in today’s society, and I believe that we are highly (and purposely) uneducated on the dangers of the pesticides and chemical additives in much of today’s food. Read more

August 7, 2015

Liebster Nomination

My dear, sweet friend, Kay, from The Barefoot Minimalist, nominated The Frugal Farmer for the Liebster award – isn’t she sweet? Here’s how the Liebster Award works:

Nominated bloggers pay it forward by nominating at least 1 other blogger
They then answer the following 11 questions, listed below

So here it goes: Read more

July 16, 2015

Emotions and Food: How to Deal

I don’t often venture on this blog to the subject of emotional issues, but as we talked this week earlier about making better food choices for our bodies I can’t help but feel that I need to address the elephant in the room: emotions and food. For many, food is definitely an emotional subject. It’s easy for me to say “Eat healthier – it’s better for you.”, but when you’re super stressed out and needing a quick fix before you lose it, it’s not so easy to avoid scarfing down a bag of Oreos (my personal choice for emotional bingeing 🙂 ).

I spent years self-medicating with food. Read more

May 26, 2015

How to Practice Physical Self Sufficiency

As we work on redefining our mission here at the Frugal Farmer, I spoke earlier on how to practice spiritual (emotional) self sufficiency and how to practice financial self sufficiency. I also shared some important survival tips for everyday life. Today we’ll talk about the third part of self sufficiency: physical self sufficiency.

The Keys to Physical Self Sufficiency

Physical self sufficiency involves a couple of different aspects of preparedness: the self sufficiency of your actual body, and self sufficiency pertaining to the things you need to care for yourself and survive. Physical self sufficiency is equally as important as the other two elements of self sufficiency (emotional and financial), but encompasses different things. Read more

March 2, 2015

How a Clean Diet Can Change Your Life

I’ve been talking lots lately on the changes we’ve experienced here at the Frugal Farm as we’ve began juicing and looking more seriously into things like a macrobiotic lifestyle. As a family of self-confessed foodies, this is a HUGE change for our family. I grew up in a family where cooking and feeding others meant love, as did sharing a good meal together. Nothing gave me more pleasure than to cook a wonderful meal and follow it up with a gooey-chocolatey dessert. I love seeing the joy on the faces of friends and loved ones as they delve into my Turtle Cake or my “secret” Chocolate Chip cookie recipe. But a funny thing happened on the way to the dessert bar: we began to not care for the emotional and physical ups and downs that came with a processed food, sugar-laden diet. The funny thing is, we really did eat much less sugar and processed foods than most Americans, but what we were eating still affected us, both emotionally and physically. We figured being stressed out and bounced around like a ping pong was normal life. Then we learned that it wasn’t. Read more

February 26, 2015

Macrobiotic Diet vs Paleo Diet: What’s the Difference?

Our favorite Strawberry Spinach Salad

Well, since we began our un-frugal practice of juicing at the beginning of the year, we have, quite by accident, delved into a world of clean eating. Before our juicing experiment, we had a pretty balanced diet, compared to most Americans, that is. We balanced eating processed food with eating whole foods, kept sugar to a minimum and always drank plenty of water. We liked our balance. It felt like we got to have our cake and eat it too, so to speak. Read more

February 23, 2015

How Moving From the Suburbs to the Country Changed our Lives

Hey, friends! Check out our guest post over at The Plutus Awards today:

We launched The Frugal Farmer near the end of December 2012. Earlier that month, we’d come to the realization that our debt had gotten WAY out of hand. For the first time in our lives, we sat down and calculated our debt numbers and our debt-to-income ratio. It was not pretty.

It was a time of great change in our lives; we’d recently sold our mini-mansion in the suburbs in order to buy a small hobby farm.

To hear more about our story, click here: