When you HAVE to be frugal and a recipe for homemade dishwasher tabs

After finding out that along with my babysitting job ending in 4 weeks- (this is not a bad thing, my commitment time has ended and we are excited not to be tied down by it anymore) my husbands paycheck has gone down because of retirement contributions going up. This is good in the long run, but when living on only a public school teachers income, this sucks. So I am scrambling with what to cut- we have no extras people- no internet, no phone, no cable..we don't go out to eat unless we have a gift card, we shop used and I am super frugal (ok, cheap..im cheap!)

With nothing else in our budget to cut, then its our food budget that will suffer. Our food budget went up a little when we had extra income from babysitting- but it has been slashed again!!! Right now I am at $300 a month for food, household/personal products and medicines. I am hoping I can get it a little lower soon as I stock my pantry. I have been LOVING a few blogs written by wonderful Mormon women about stocking up and saving money. My goal right now is to shop sales on pantry items, to preserve what I can through canning and we are hoping to have a small garden this summer (if we can figure out how to keep the mass amounts of wild bunnies out of our garden), as well as making all my own bread products. We try not to eat too much processed food and I wish we could eat more natural, but with a tight food budget we will do what we can.

So- because of slashing the budget again, I started looking for a recipe to make my own dishwasher tabs. And I found a good one. I already make my own laundry soap- Great recipe here. So I figured why not try one out. I found it on another homemaker type blog called Louise's Country Closet.It took me less than 10 minutes to make them and I was able to make enough to last a month. Two of the ingredients, the Borax and the Washing Soda are main ingredients in my laundry soap recipe so I already had those on hand. If you were to buy those, the epsom salts and the lemon juice (buy this at the $tree) all at once it would cost you $10 and they would give you about 6 months worth of dishwasher tabs if you used one a day. I decided I wanted to store mine in an old coffee can and it works great, I just keep it under the sink near the dishwasher. When putting them in the dishwasher they do not fit in the little container where you would normally put your soap but I used her suggestion and put it on the bottom of my dishwasher and it worked wonderfully!