Taking Stock

summer squash from my garden

Well prodded by a readers comment (thanks for that, Nancy!) I am reminded I need to update a few things on this page.

This has been a terrible hot dry summer and even tho we finally got some monsoon rains, it wasn't nearly enough and my place didn't always get any even when it was raining by the bucket load just 2 miles away.

But the last few mornings have been much cooler and there is a taste of fall in the air. Fall in Arizona means wanting the heater in the morning and the cooler in the afternoon. Many summer crops, like the beans and squashes are still going strong, but I am making room where I can and seeding in the fall and winter crops. Gardening in the winter is much easier than in the summer and costs almost nothing once things get going. I've been going over my wish lists and gardening records and thinking about what I want to do next year.

The kitchen cupboards, Oct 2009

In 2009 I had a very large successful garden and did a lot of canning and pickling. This year the garden was a bit smaller and not as prolific and I have not canned much of anything. I decided this year to try and eat fresh from the garden each day, rather than do a lot of preserving. Some of the food in the picture, especially the pickles were still in the cupboard this summer. They have either been eaten or dumped as the quality deteriorates a lot after a year.

However, when the weather cools off I will probably can some jars of bean soup, potato soup, chili and chicken stock. These are great convenience foods that make life a little easier on hectic days.

The garden has been producing over 100 pounds of vegetables a month during June, July and August. With all the winter squashes September's totals could top 200, but I'll have to wait and see. 

Now I'm sure you are wanting to know a bit where I've gotten concerning the grocery budget, eh? Well I think I'm doing pretty good, actually. In July I spent $148.22 and in August I spent $149.08. In analyzing what I'm buying it breaks down into basically meat, dairy, fruit and marinated olives.

I can't do much about the dairy situation until I am able to retire from my regular job so I can once again have dairy goats. I have been finding wonderful deals on pork and stocked up a bit, but the meat category should come way down next month as I will have several ducks to put in the freezer. There may be a couple of young chickens to join them by December, depending on whether or not they are actually roosters. The marinated olives with feta are something I eat a small amount of nearly everyday; they replace regular salad dressing on my salads. I am on the look out for something similar to replace this with, as it is about $10 a pound and I usually go through three or four pounds a month. Right now I can't do much about the cost of fruit, except to stock up when ever I can when things are on sale, as the garden doesn't make much fruit yet.

In other financial areas things are going well, the line of credit on my house is nearly paid off and then I will only have my land payment and regular bills to pay. If you've joined me recently, I use a software program called YNAB or You Need A Budget. You can read about my experience with this software here. I've also written a bit about getting out of debt using YNAB here.

Now I have been spending money this summer, but not frivolously. I have been using it to set up infrastructure for the future; to make my future more independent of political and corporate situations and natural disasters. I am expanding the garden area, building up a poultry flock that will provide me with meat, eggs, and income through the sale of young birds and eggs. I am hoping next summer to be able to add pigs to the mix and or some meat goats. Which order I do things in totally depends on what falls in my lap first.

Right at the moment the poultry enterprise is running in the red, as there are a large number of young birds that won't pay for themselves until next summer. Also this is molting season for the hens and they don't lay well when they are molting. From 6 hens I'm only getting 1-3 eggs a day. But the younger girls should begin laying any time now, then I will have eggs to sell and they will begin to pay back the investment. By this time next year the poultry operation should actually be a money maker.

Grocery Budget Update; June

red & yellow new potatoes cooked together

June's grocery total was $141.31 This again was mostly dairy, meat and some pickled olives. The garden is beginning to really come on now, with potatoes, tomatoes, squash, corn, greens, and herbs. I even managed to get peaches & plums in June and harvested summer apples in July.

Of course the water bill for May was $175. However I think part of that was a slow leak that went undetected most of the month. Part of it also can be blamed on having to use sprinklers to keep things watered because my work schedule was is so crazy I don't always have enough time at home to hand water like I usually do. And of course I must also blame the weather. I went from March 18 to June 16 without rain and then I only got .2" Got another .5" on July 4th, but we have been having a lot higher humidity as our monsoon tries to get going so things are not drying out so badly as they were. You can see lots of garden photos over at The Edible Garden.

Even if the water bill continues to be high, it will all come out ok in the end. The water use now is not only growing what I'm eating now, but part of what I will eat this winter in the form of squash and potatoes.

I haven't had time to total up the harvest poundage for June, but will try to get to that soon. I also need to sit down and check out the numbers for the chickens feed and eggs delivered. In the mean time the flock has been expanding, in addition to the original 4 hens and a rooster, I bought 4 pullet chicks in March. Recently I was gifted 4 poults about 6 weeks old. A poult is a young bird that is big enough you can't call it a chick any more. It will be a bit before I see if they are girls or boys. In addition one hen is sitting on some eggs, due to hatch around July 20. I also received 4 young ducklings and am going to go pick up about 8 more this weekend. So it might be awhile before the poultry enterprise hits the black.

Welsummer poults

However, by the time the young pullets begin laying in September, that should really move the egg money ahead and of course I will harvest excess roosters and drakes for meat.

In the meantime I make a few dollars each week selling excess produce at the farmer's market and of course eat my fill of what ever veggies are ready.

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 About the Grocery Budget

The chickens

So now I have chickens again. I bought 4 pullets just coming into lay and a young rooster (so I can hatch my own chicks to raise for meat).

Now that I have 2-4 eggs every day, they can replace part of the meat I would usually eat. Will the chickens pay? From previous experience I know that they will. In the past I had more hens and enough eggs to sell, covering the feed bill, meaning my family ate eggs for free.

While buying pullets costs more, you end up with exactly the number of hens you wanted, as usually there will not be any mortality at this age, unless there is some kind of accident. And no, eggs will not clog your arteries or any of that other silly stuff the scare mongers are trying to sell you. That happens to come from eating store bought, industrial eggs from chickens that are fed a totally unnatural diet and kept in very close quarters. (the government regulations say they only have to have about as much space as a sheet of computer paper per bird!).

Studies have shown that free range, pastured hens produce eggs that are actually very good for you, with more good cholesterol and less of the bad, less saturated fat, more beta carotene, the vitamin A precursor, more omega 3 fatty acids and more vitamin E. You can read more about this at Mother Earth News.

While right now there is no pasture on my land my girls get a good lot of weeds, grass, clover and veggie trimmings every day. Instead of buying regular laying pellets, which are full of GMO corn and soy, I bought wild birdseed, containing milo, broom corn and sunflower seeds. Besides this they get some worms and grubs from the compost and garden every day. So I think my eggs are probably at least a close second to full free range pastured ones.

On to the grocery budget. While March's total is not much lower than February's it is a bit lower, $142.05. A lot of that is for tea, coffee, olives and organic corn chips. Along with some cheese, onions, sweet potatoes, sour cream, cheese, yogurt and milk. And I haven't spent any money at the grocery store in April yet.

Having been slowly rethinking my spending and not buying a number of items, like garbage bags, I've been pondering what to do about the pricier items on my list. Coffee, tea, corn chips and olives are not cheap. Some of my herb plants are getting big enough to start picking and today I realized I still had a quart of spearmint from my mother's that I dried last fall. So beginning today I'm cutting the black tea with herbs. When I have enough tea herbs to go around I'll quit buying the black tea and probably won't buy coffee, either, just drink tea.

I could give up the corn chips, or just buy them once in awhile for a treat. (I love salsa and sour cream with corn chips for a snack). But I won't buy non-organic ones.

The olives are a problem though. I love the marinated olives from the store deli and eat a few every day with a drizzle of the oil on my salads. I do this instead of eating a heavy dressing. So I'll have to think about a replacement. Although when I ran out this week I did just start using some balsam vinegar on my salad instead.

I"m pretty sure that April's grocery bill will be much smaller than March's. I've received a windfall of free produce and my son has some extra meat in his freezer he want's to give me before it gets too old. The garden is growing exponentially and I'm sure by July I will practically be a vegetarian.

Grocery Budget Continued

My YNAB budget program tells me that my average monthly budget for the past 12 months is $209.74. Of course some months were less and some were more. I did not have my garden in until fall so it really doesn't factor in at all. While it did give me about $30 worth of produce, mostly salad greens, in January, that of course isn't enough.

In January I did buy 20 pounds of chicken which were on sale very cheap. I try not to think of how they were raised when I cook them. I'm looking forward to having my own flock and my own meat and eggs again. However, I'll eat the last of it probably this week. There are a few bits of leftovers in the freezer along with cheese that was on sale. These will help me out this month. I will probably make a pot of chicken soup along with a pot of pinto beans with green chili out of the leftover bones and bits of chicken, which should carry me through close to the middle of the month.

Since my garden is not producing very much I'm buying produce through the Bountiful Baskets co-op, which is a great value for the money. Through them in Jan I was able to buy a 38 pound case lot of Pink Lady apples for just $22.50, less than $1 a pound. I'm not that fond of citrus, but I love fresh apples. This time of year I eat 5-10 pounds of apples a week, so this lot should carry me over for the month. This is a terrific savings since even on sale apples at the store are about $1 a pound and some varieties regular price is $1.49 to over $2 a pound.

While I have left the average of $209.74 as the grocery budget this month, I'd like to get that down to about $150 if I possibly can. I have a lead on buying grass fed lamb and want to save up so I can buy one when they are available. I don't know the price yet, waiting for an answer back from the grower.

So what are you doing about the high price of food in your neighborhood?

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.

LOOKING FORWARD

organic baby lettuce & radishes, home grown!

Today I am thinking about the future. I soooo want to be able to stay home and putter about with the garden, some animals and play on the computer! I know that I need to get a bit more organized about every part of my life and that is a continuing process. Besides creating various income streams that will create money for me to live on in the future, I am also trying to reduce the amount of money I need to live on.

Some days it seems like I'm spinning my wheels, I'm trying to save money but I need to spend money to build the infrastructure I need for the future. But I keep plugging along! Right now I have been harvesting lovely baby lettuce for my daily salads, along with occasional radishes, carrots and beets. I've gotten my greenhouse up and am planting things in it and I'm working on another one. Details can be found over at the Edible Garden Blog. Be sure and check out Seedy Saturday, I'm giving away free garden seeds! Having all my home grown lettuce means I'm saving about $10 a week on the grocery bill, perhaps even more.

My greenhouses turn out a big crooked and ugly, but I point out to the naysayers that I'm making something useful out of stuff other people have thrown away! So who cares what it looks like? It works and does the job I need it to do!

In the meantime I've also been writing a lot of articles over on Squidoo about all sorts of things and that is a small but growing stream of income, along with my Zazzle shop and I've even sold some books in my Amazon store, so things are looking up!

I had hoped to have my debt all paid off by January but this is not going to happen. Overspending on my vacation put a dent in that, but I should be out of debt before the end of 2012, even with spending some money building new infrastructure. Because most of what I am building will give me a long term gain economically, building up my gardens, putting up a new chicken house and raising chickens, all of this will put food on the table and reduce the amount of money I spend at the grocery store, saving me money in the long run.

I recently read about a lady who is trying to spend zero cash for her family's Christmas presents by using Craigslist, bartering and her own crafting ability. I think this is a wonderful thing to do myself, tho I don't know as I will have the time needed to do it this year.

Sometimes Making Do is Bad Economy

From Nov 11, 2009

Some recent events have me focused on doing things the right way instead of my usual slap dash and make do. I had some little hens for eggs and spent a lot of money buying some Buff Orpington chicks. The Buffs are a dual purpose heritage breed of chicken. They lay lots of brown eggs and  make nice meaty birds to eat. While not listed as endangered by the Livestock Conservancy they do need more breeders out there keeping them alive. [some older varieties of livestock have actually become extinct because people quit keeping their own farm stock]. Well 2 dogs attacks and a skunk have killed off my chickens. I have 2 left out of 20. So there went a lot of time and money down the drain as well as my future meat and eggs. [edit May 31, 2011 A few nights later another skunk got those last two. I, at least, was able to get the skunk. But these events took the wind out of my sails and in the time since I gradually let the garden and what not go. However, I am resurrecting things and coming back with renewed energy.]

What does this have to do with Cottage Economy? Just this, I made do in building my pens. I just slapped them together with just the thought of keeping the chickens IN and didn’t think about keeping other things OUT. I have learnt my lesson. In the future my animals will have secure pens and cages. In fact they are going to be living in Fort Knox. Because it certainly has not been an economy to make do.

This will mean more capital outlay in secure fencing and housing before acquiring an animal. But it will also mean that the animal will not be destroyed before it fulfills it’s destiny in my household. In the end it will add to my economy, not detract.