You Get What You Get

Salad tomatoes

My grand daughters have a saying, "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit". I think that fits very well with eating from the garden. People of course have different goals for their gardens. Some are just to supplement what they buy at the store, while others eat completely from their own resources (which is my eventual goal.)

It is all a matter of attitude. Some people, getting bored with never ending greens will let the greens languish in the fridge and buy something different at the store. Just because they are bored eating the same thing every day. Me? well, you get what you get and you don't throw a fit! You find new ways to use the same old thing. Instead of steamed greens you stir fry them with bacon and onion. Sometimes you top them off with fried eggs and sometimes you mix them with potatoes. But every bite you eat from the garden is money saved at the grocery store. When you have tomatoes but no lettuce, you have tomato salad. Eggplant but no meat, eggplant Parmesan.

"What's for dinner?" becomes "whatever is ready to pick and eat" not "what am I in the mood for?" If it's the same thing for a few days running, well that is ok, because after that then something else will be ready. While some things are staples for months on end, like greens, other things have a short and fleeting season. So I gorge on it while it's available and then look forward to the next thing. And the next.

Home grown peaches

 Americans are spoiled by grocery stores having food grown in other countries so they can have bananas and other fruits all year. But such opulence comes at a high environmental price, to say nothing of what it does to the pocketbook. I think as the price of transportation goes up we will see a slight shift away from this. For my part I eat what is in season, whether I grow it or buy it. I don't buy grapes from Chile in January. In fact I don't buy imported fruits and vegetables at all. And I am really glad that our produce is labeled with the country of origin.

new potatoes

My goal, too this year, is not to do too much canning and preserving. But rather, to eat fresh, each thing at it's peak, then go on to the next thing. This too saves time, money and work. It means I can focus my preserving efforts on those things that are highly perishable but make a decent preserved product. I won't make more than a few jars of green beans, because I don't eat that many. But I might make a few jars of new potatoes because I don't have a good place to store potatoes and it's nice to have some already cooked and ready to go. I probably won't have enough tomatoes to make much sauce this year, but that's ok too, I don't eat much pasta any more and would just as soon eat it with pesto sauce. I do like to make a few jars of convenience food. Home made soup and chili in pint jars are nice to have on the shelf, ready to pop into a lunch box or heat up for a quick meal after a long day.  Having once lost a large amount of food to a freezer failure, I don't rely on freezing for much of my storage. Mostly freezing is a short term storage option and most of the space is taken up with meat.

Grocery Budget Update

A harvest in May

May's grocery total was $176.99, quite a bit more than April's. Most of that is still meat, milk, organic yogurt, butter, cheese and olives, along with some fresh and frozen fruit. The good news is that June will probably come in very much under budget, unless there is a great sale on meat and I stock up.

The garden is giving me a fair variety of items now, besides chard and red amaranth greens I have tons of small tomatoes, a small amount of lettuce that I'm babying through the heat and yummy new potatoes. I got a few handfuls of purple beans before something ate them. I think it was a pesky squirrel which also ate my first cantaloupe. I did however get revenge and mr. squirrel is no more.

First eggplant

The eggplants are beginning to trickle in along with squash, peaches, plums, green onions, with corn and more varieties of squash and potatoes to come. Does the garden pay? I think so, though I haven't had time to total up all my expenses and harvests yet, I do think that it will pay big time, even with having to pay for city water to grow it.

The chickens are still a bit in the red, since I'm feeding 4 pullets and a rooster that aren't laying eggs. But once these new girls begin to lay I think we'll see the numbers begin to change. Besides, how can you calculate the advantage to the new garden space of having it scratched up and manured by the chickens? What value can you place on the number of bugs and grubs they eat, reducing the numbers of things that might munch on the veggies?

In other news I'm making yogurt. I really hate that so much of the time a gallon of milk costs less than a half gallon but I can't drink the gallon up before it goes bad. So I've been culturing my own yogurt and this should also get the grocery budget down. I've taken to having fruit and yogurt nearly every morning for breakfast, so go through it pretty fast.

Also of note, many of my tea herbs have been big enough to harvest and dry so I'm no longer buying tea, but drinking home grown. You can see more pictures of my garden harvests and my garden at my gardening blog;, The Edible Garden

Even if you can't have a garden, you can save a lot of money by buying staple items in bulk and learning to make your own convenience mixes and 'fast' foods. It's easy to buy oatmeal, dried fruits and nuts in bulk and make your own granola. There are great recipes out there to make your own biscuit mix, cake and cookie mixes, even seasoning mixes for tacos, hot sauce and many more things. It doesn't take that long to make a bulk batch once in awhile, then you'll always have it on the shelf, for much less than the price you pay at the store. And you can use much healthier ingredients and leave out all the chemicals.

More Grocery Budget Reduction

root crops from my garden

Just a small review of the marvelous shrinking grocery budget. You can read more about the beginning of this Here and Here. So what happened in February? I only spent $144.17 for the month. And I still have half the giant package of pork chops I bought on sale along with a bag of chicken breasts ;-). Most of what's been happening is that the weather has been warmer than usual and the garden is really beginning to take off. While the harvest is nothing like what it will be during the warmest months, it's been enough to keep me in two large salads a day, along with greens for cooking, a bit of broccoli and some root crops like turnips and carrots. You can see lots more about my garden at the Edible Garden Blog.

And we're almost two weeks into March and I've only spent $47.92 so far. What did I buy? Two pounds of sharp Tillamook cheese (on sale for the same price as the cheap store brand), some marinated olives, (which I put on my salads instead of dressing), coffee, tea, (both on sale), a couple of onions, a bag of organic corn chips, a couple of sweet potatoes, and a few grapefruit. If I'm careful the cheese and olives will last for two weeks of salads, the tea and coffee a month or more. The other things, who knows, just depends on when I have a whim to eat them.

I've still got some chicken and rabbit in the freezer and most of my five pound bag of pinto beans. Which reminds me, I should cook some up this week on my days off. I also have a few more apples left from the huge boxful I bought last month from Bountiful Baskets. Of course February only had 29 days in it and March has 31, and I've eaten up some more of my stored food. So wondering how low will March's total be? Probably depends on the weather and the garden.

Nibbling Away at the Grocery Budget

Homegrown Salad

Right now I am nibbling away at my grocery budget.  I've just run some numbers and in 2011 I spent an average of $203.16 a month at the grocery store. In December, when my garden started really kicking in, I managed to only spend $119 for the month.

I am working on being more frugal with my money in general, making sure I've turned off the lights I'm not using, cooking on my airtight wood burning stove instead of using the gas or the microwave.

I've decided I want to really cut back on my grocery bill this coming year, partly by growing all of my own vegetables and some of my own fruit. (Fruit trees take several years to come into bearing, but strawberries only take 2 years to get up to speed and of course melons only take a few months)  While I won't forgo meat entirely I will probably have some meatless days each week, replacing meat with beans and other protein foods that are less costly. This months strategy is to use up the rest of the meat that is in my freezer as well as make a dent in 5 pounds of pinto beans that were given to me.

There are many ways to stretch your food dollars. I bought a large ham before Christmas on sale for .99 cents a pound. I cooked it and had several dinners & lunches of ham, sweet potato and applesauce. Then I made 2 gallons of 15 bean soup out of the leftover bits of ham and bone. Some of that is still in the freezer.

When whole chickens are on sale I try to get several. Each one makes several meals, first roasted chicken with carrots and potatoes, then either chicken and rice soup or chicken & dumplings.  When my kids were little and I either raised a lot of chickens or bought 12 or more on sale very cheap I would cut them up myself. I would save a couple whole ones for roasted chicken dinners. The rest I packaged for the freezer as boneless skinless breasts, legs & thighs for BBQ. The backs, tails, ribs, wings and necks all went into the stock pot and I would make 5 gallons of chicken broth and then can it in pints and quarts for later. I'd use the broth for gravy or as a soup starter. I think I need to start doing these kinds of things again.

So what's on your menus for this week? Tonight I've cooked a large pork roast, so pork, brown rice and salad tonight and probably tomorrow also. Tomorrow I might pull some carrots and beets to go with the  leftover roast. Maybe I'll make a pot of soup too.

Change Should Be Gradual for Best Results

Homegrown organic salad mix, much cheaper than store bought!

When you are thinking about making lifestyle changes, whether they are because of your own core beliefs or are imposed from the outside due to things beyond your control it is always a good idea to work at them gradually.

When you are working with your budget you should take things item by item and make changes slowly. Making too many changes too fast increases your risk of failure.

Right now I am working on changing my diet to one that is nearly all home grown. I can't do that all at once, I must do it at the pace the garden sets for me. But I can concentrate on doing everything possible within the framework the garden gives me. I eat a lot of organic salad greens, generally about 2 pounds a week. at over $5 a pound this amounts to a substantial amount of grocery money each month.

I have several areas of baby lettuce production in the garden, at differing stages of development. In the beginning, as the first area began to produce leaves big enough to pick, there wasn't really enough to make a dent in the grocery budget. Now that I have several areas in production I have been able to stop buying salad mix at the grocery store. Some weeks I am not able to pick as much as I could eat, so I have adapted my diet to the level of garden production. If I don't have enough salad greens, perhaps I am able to pick beets or carrots. If I'm not able to harvest enough vegetables from the garden then I fall back on the grocery store, but now I purchase things that are a little less expensive than salad mix.

I think it's all about adaptability and doing things a little at a time. By this time next year I don't think I will be buying any vegetables from the grocery store at all. My next big ticket in the grocery dept. to work on will be fruit. I do eat a lot of fruit, especially apples and pears in the winter, probably about 3 pounds a week. It will be awhile before I am able to put in a lot of apple and pear trees. In the meantime I need to work on taking better care of the apple trees I do have so that they will bear more fruit. I'll also be putting some other fruiting plants around the place, like strawberries. And of course come summer there will be watermelons and cantaloups in the garden.

Other things in the budget that I'm slowly nibbling away at is of course the last of the debt. I won't be done with it in January like I'd hoped, because I took a nice vacation. But I'll be done with it soon and then I will be able to ramp up the infrastructure I need to become more self sufficient, like a decent building to house the rabbits and some more chickens, where dogs can't kill them. Electric fencing so I can fence off part of my land and perhaps get some dairy and meat goats. There are many other projects planned, but for now I'll just go at them a bit at a time and try not to be too impatient.

Are you thinking you don't have enough land to grow your own food? You might be surprised at how little you actually need, check out How Much Land Does it Take to Grow Your Own Food?