I'm all for being self-sufficient, I do a little gardening, and bake my own bread, but I do think scaling via your community is the best most frugal thing you can do, supporting local businesses, getting value for money, and turning over capital that generates goods and services is for me still the best way to encourage the best use of resources

Being frugal doesn't have to mean cutting down, but spending in a way that is more efficient, maybe your time is better suited to making furniture, so why waste your time baking bread? The division of labour is how we improve our lives

If you do some things yourself like lets say cutting the lawn, why not do the neighbours and bag a favour from them in the future.

Of course, many have a lot of needless consumption that can be cut down and that's a start, but cutting down only gets you so far.