Growing and preserving so much of our food gives us a high degree of food security. It allows us to watch for sales and buy in bulk to further stretch our dollars and set us up for months at a time. It can lead to an issue, though. Forgetting what all you have and not using it in a timely fashion. Beth currently has me under the challenge of using at least one stash item every day.
This past year we put up a lot of tomato sauce. Beth took advantage of sales for rice side dishes and just last week we prepped and froze ten pounds of russet potatoes when they went on sale for $1 per five-pound bag. (We don’t grow russets because we can usually buy them this cheaply.) We maintain what Beth has dubbed “The Stash” of food and “backup” items.
A backup item is a reserve of frequently used things like agave syrup, broths, ramen noodles, butter, etc. Running out of a staple is perhaps my largest pet-peeve and has driven me to hissy fits in the past. (I’m much calmer now that I’m retired.) Whenever we take the backup off the shelf, the item immediately goes on the shopping list.
Back to our glut of tomato sauce: we’ll still have a few jars left when next years’ garden begins producing. Provided I remember to use them, otherwise we’ll end up with more than we can use. Toward that end, as well as to keep dinners from becoming too repetitive, I maintain a rolling menu and a dinner checklist of the various dishes I frequently prepare for us.
This checklist is in constant flux with adding new items for more variety and removing what isn’t working for us. It’s also themed day-by-day; Asian/African on Mondays, Spanish/Mexican on (Taco) Tuesdays, Steakhouse Saturdays, etc. to ensure variety throughout the week. Currently I just go down the list in order for each day, italicizing what goes on the menu next. On a second page, I do the same with weekend breakfasts and weekend desserts.
The rolling menu contains a section for what I am using from the stash (and a reminder of my main tasks to help with timing meal prep that day). This means I have to keep tabs on what I have, although I am working on an inventory/checklist to be more precise. (I’m such a nerd.)
The menu also provides a shopping list for the coming week because I’ll be buying for what I’m making as opposed to making what I can from what I have. It ensures that I always have what I need. Toward that end, I maintain the menu two weeks out and update it every day.
Beth will write some future posts on how she got started with the stash and keeps it stocked on a budget. For today, I’m dropping this quick note with the hopes it helps you with your dinner/shopping planning.
One of my brothers has remarked often that we eat well. This is a big part of why and how.
We save our pennies on two fronts: First, on the house and our lifestyle; second on our micro-farming operation itself. Last time, I wrote about how the farm saves us money despite the cost of building it. Today I’ll talk about smart spending and little about our fixer-upper.
Like many people these days, our combined incomes keep us housed and warm, while eating out and going to a hockey game are luxuries. My daughter works two part-time jobs and I work part-time at a Starbucks and make a few pennies (so far at least) off my writing. Being self-sufficient in much of our food is something we enjoy doing, while giving us the chance to live larger than our incomes. Still, we need to be self-reliant and spend our funds strategically.
We base our frugal living on two concepts: one, frugal buying and two, applying a DIY approach wherever we can.
Frugal buying itself consists of a five-phase strategy: Smart buying, Thrifting, Buying in bulk, Operating a system of backups, and The Stash.
Beth’s mother, to put it politely, is miserly. So my daughter already has a number of thrifty habits. For instance buying anything, which is not on sale, upsets her, other than the food items we don’t produce for ourselves. And she gets as many of those on sale as she possibly can. If we don’t absolutely need an item right away, we will wait for it to go on sale and then stock up. Part of the model is buying non-perishable items while on sale whether you need them immediately or not. Because more than likely, they won’t be on sale when you need them. When shampoos were two for one, for example, we bought four. It will be 2021 before we need to buy more.
Smart buying requires you to know regular prices. We have seen items marked as being on sale, when they were marked down from $3.79 to $3.75 for example. Keeping track of current prices is key to getting the best deal, and sometimes knowing if it is a deal. We compare prices between stores and make a round of two or three stores at once to buy where the items are cheapest. It helps that our three main stores are clustered within a few blocks of each other. (It also saves on gas.)
To keep from comparing apples to oranges, try to know the prices at a per unit level, i.e. per ounce, or per pound. I have found half-gallon jugs of milk to be cheaper than gallons. Why? Shipping costs. You can fit nine half-gallons (4.5 gallons) in the same crate, which holds four gallons. They cost less per ounce to ship and the savings may be passed on to you. Also, generic items are often made by a brand-name company. Zenith made Montgomery Ward branded televisions back in the day. Generic products are good quality items for which you’re not paying the advertising and other marketing costs accompanying a well-known brand.
As an albeit extreme example of price comparison, when Beth was first learning Excel for school, she created a spreadsheet comparing four local stores to Chewy, variety by variety, for our girls’ (six cats) canned and dry food. She knew exactly where to buy what for maximum savings. What she didn’t order from Chewy, we picked up during one of our rounds.
Price increases at the local brick and mortar stores eventually led to buying almost everything from Chewy. Because buying large orders equals free shipping, and because there are so many varieties of cat food, Beth literally buys nine months of food at a time and we add it to the stash. After she takes the time to sort it out so all we ever need to do is grab a box to bring up and the girls are assured variation. They may have a more balanced diet than we do at times.
As long as you make notes of prices each time you shop, you’ll stay on top of them, even if you are only checking on the main items you buy. Alternatively, you can plan on a longer trip in which you note the prices of most of the items you want to keep track of. This is up to you.
Note this concept relates to all items, appliances as well as food and other consumables. When we bought a programmable pressure cooker (generic Instapot), we purchased the least expensive and highly reliable unit from Aldi. As with my television example above, I know it was built by a major company. It has been performing fantastically.
Thrifting; purchasing from yard sales, second hand shops, individuals online, and the like; is a major portion of frugal spending for us. My espresso and Keurig machines came from resale shops. Total cost for both: $3. Our microwave is a $15 yard sale special and has been working perfectly for over a year. We purchase many kitchen and houseware items from these sources that we might never have purchased otherwise, such as a mini-donut maker for $2. Plates, serving platters, a set of cookbooks older than I am, the list is as extensive as the money we have saved.
One key note to make about buying items from individuals online is this: know the prices of items. I’ve seen several posts by folks who obviously did not know the price of what they were selling and inadvertently asked for a price higher than or equal to a new item. Those deals aren’t always deals. Do your research before assuming it’s cheap because it’s resale. A lot of times, people are simply trying to get rid of things and don’t have any idea of what is a reasonable amount to ask. They pick a number they like.
Thirdly, some items we go through so much of it makes sense to buy in bulk from a local restaurant supply shop, GFS (formerly Gordon Food Service). A twenty-pound bag of flour does not last long, when I make bread weekly, as well as banana bread, pancakes, brownies, etc. Wheat flour and semolina flour last a little longer than white flour, though we purchase those in bulk also.
We bought the big bag of semolina flour because pasta is a weekly favorite. Naturally, we make our own sauce with our organically grown produce too. A meal for two of pasta is simply 1 cup semolina flour, 1 tsp salt, 1 Tbs. olive oil, and 2 large eggs. Mix this as thoroughly as you can in an electric mixer, then squeeze it all into a (somewhat sticky) ball. If you don’t have a pasta machine, roll it out in the counter with a wooden roller, flipping and dusting it with white flour to prevent sticking. Once you’ve created ten or twelve layers it should hold together nicely. Then roll it up loosely and cut it into noodles of whatever width you wish. We’ve done it so many times, I can make enough pasta for four and have it in boiling water in thirty minutes. It really is that simple and easy. And, it’s pennies on the dollar of store bought boxes, plus no unpronounceable additives.
Pasta sauce cooking with garden fresh herbs as well as vegetables.
Pizza sauce
Backups: The fourth facet of our system grew out of my frustration at running out of anything. Little frustrates me more than discovering I don’t have a key ingredient for something I looked forward to all day and suddenly can’t make for dinner or dessert. Food is such a big part of my life and leisure routine that this sort of event really does ruin my day. Also, if it’s something I need to run out for, the likelihood of paying full price, because I had to go to a convenience or the closest store, increases.
To prevent this, I created a simple system of having backups. That is, for every key item (most actually) I had a backup bottle, box, bag, etc. on the shelf. The trigger point for purchasing was when I took that backup item from the shelf rather than relying on remembering to buy it when the one I was using got low. I always forget something that way. With this system, I always had everything I needed by immediately adding it to the shopping list.
Of course, with our buying non-perishables on sale before we may need them, we often have several backups. The question has evolved to how are we on each item, when something is on sale. Are we down to the last one or two? Still, should we get to where we’ve pulled the last one from the shelf, we know it’s time to buy more (hopefully on sale). In this way, we never run out and therefore never have to pay a premium price because we had no other choice.
Obviously, we have to keep these items somewhere. We have four, metal shelves in the basement for stocking up on sale items, etc., which we call The Stash. Small items and those in paper or plastic packaging go into small tubs for safekeeping. We store our home canned produce here as well and one shelving unit is dedicated to the girls. We’re not preppers, but you might think we were for the amount of non-perishables and canned goods on these shelves. We simply grow enough of everything for an entire year.
The bulk of the stash
We didn’t just go out and buy tons of stuff to create the Stash. Beth built it up slowly over a period of six months with a set, monthly budget for extra items. She spends much less now keeping it stocked.
Pick a space out of direct sunlight and away from sources of water, e.g. the laundry room, to set up your stash. Direct sunlight heats up anything it touches, thus it creates a temperature extreme you want to avoid. For this reason, a garage or attic is unsuitable for this purpose. The space we use is in the center of the basement away from windows where the light and temperature are most constant throughout the year.
Note we also have a chest freezer and a second refrigerator (which came with the house). You can locate these anywhere as long as they are not in sunlight or somewhere which becomes extremely hot.
Our second approach to frugality is DIY. Never pay for what you can do yourself. Caveat: be sure you truly do know what you’re doing. Take classes if you need to. Watch videos. Educate yourself. Don’t learn the hard way that you only thought you knew what you were doing. Voice of experience here.
What comes to mind, when I say DIY? Home improvement projects, right? Yes, and then some. DIY is NOT limited to household repairs and enhancements. I’ve already mentioned two kitchen DIY activities: making our own bread and pasta. Further, canning our produce, including pasta and pizza sauces, and salsas, etc. is DIY. Yes, cooking from scratch is DIY in the kitchen. The idea behind DIY is saving money and cooking from scratch does that. It’s also healthier.
The first batch of carrots; half of what we canned.
Of course, we have done DIY on our fixer-upper from the day I moved in in July 2016. I slept on a camp cot in the kitchen for the first two days because the first project was sanding and refinishing the neglected floors. Next came painting the walls which were so old and drab you couldn’t tell them from the new plaster I put on to repair the scratches and divots.
The yard had to be reclaimed from the wild tangles of shrubby trees and out of control day lilies. We did it ourselves rather than hire a landscaping crew and used a manual push mower on the quarter acre lot that first summer, before buying a mower at half the big box store by getting it from Aldi of all places. It has a Briggs and Stratton engine and has been a champ for three seasons now.
There was no walkway from the house to the parking pad at the alley. Our lot is long. In the winter, we wore a muddy path one-hundred feet from house to cars. We applied our frugal buying model to creating a walkway. When Lowe’s closed some underperforming stores, Beth found a paving stone she liked and bought everything they had left and got free delivery. This was in November. We covered them with tarps for the winter. Our area is safe enough we didn’t have to worry about theft or vandalism, though covering and parking next to the three pallets helped.
In the spring, I rented a manual sod cutter and got a workout removing the grass from the path we’d laid out. I would have rented a power one, but it had rained for a week straight and the ground was too wet for it. I relocated the sod to a barren area under a tree and trenched the pathway with our garden tiller, hauling the soil to the new berry beds one wheelbarrow full at a time. We bought the sand and gravel for it in bulk. The weed block beneath it all was bought at 30% of original price in a closeout the previous year. We laid all of the blocks ourselves and had enough to replace a broken and tilted section of the gangway beside the house. I broke up the walkway with a rented jackhammer (so much fun) and repurposed the stone along the back of the house in something of a mosaic pattern for storing the grills and lawn furniture on something solid (as well as hold the weeds down).
Finished walkway six months after completion.
Relocating the sod.
In progress in the spring.
This was easily $5000 worth of work we did for $1500.
In the basement, we fixed a chronic flooding issue (maybe why the rental management company sold the place) for $20. The original design of the house had a bathroom in the basement once (or intended to). But they didn’t install a Palmer Valve, a backflow preventer. In the 50’s, when the house was built, this wasn’t an issue. In these days of torrential spring rains, you could count on at least one annual flood. The solution: cement a paving block over the drain opening. It’s still there, only capped. Dry ever since. No more litter boxes floating around in circles.
Other problems only needed inexpensive solutions as well. For instance, all of the windows in the house were replaced at one time, except the bathroom. They didn’t forget to buy a window, just to make it privacy glass. It’s in the basement. We’ll use it in the shed probably. In the meantime, I channeled my jack-of-all-trades grandfather and went old school, building a storm window for winter and a screen for summer. When we remodel the bathroom, we’ll install a new, frosted-glass window.
Old fashioned storm winter with holes, covered by a flange inside, for those milder spring days to come.
Our kitchen DIY has not been limited to cooking. We gave our upper cabinets a facelift by stripping the varnish and applying $40 of washable wallpaper and painting the frames, plus a couple of LED lights under the cabinets. The lowers were slated for similar improvement, but had suffered severe water damage from a previous owner. The counter is also crumbling from beneath beside the stove. The lowers need replacing. I’ll build the frames myself and include a narrow width dishwasher. More on that when it happens.
The uppers used to look like the lowers. Much nicer now and the room is brighter.
Open and easy access storage for our most used pans.
Most recently, I constructed a bread-slicing guide for less than half of what one cost in Walmart, and it’s much better, of course. Seriously, I built it to last a lifetime. I’m actually considering selling them. I’ve already had one request. I had to do something about slicing our bread, though. Thirty years I’ve been making bread and I still can’t freehand slice a loaf nicely to save my life.
Sized to fit a standard loaf pan and produce half-inch slices.
The greatest thing since…well, it is sliced bread.
Next time: Let’s Get This Garden Started. Time to start this season’s seedlings.
One question I expect popped into your mind is are we really saving money, when we’re spending so much on building and maintaining our micro-farm, and on the equipment and supplies to preserve the output. The short answer is, probably yes. If not already ahead after just three seasons, we are at least at breakeven.
We did not plant a garden in the first year because we took possession of our neglected house in July of 2016. I spent that summer and fall clearing the yard and getting the house ready to live in. Like the pioneer farmers of old clearing growing space, I was cutting down trees and ripping out brush, which had become entwined with the chain link fence. A prior owner wanted to mow on both sides of the fence and so installed it eighteen inches inside the property line, giving the illusion the lot was three feet thinner than it is. A pair of ailing elderberry vines grew through the fence on the south side of the house. On the north side, where I would locate the growing beds, weeds and junk trees choked it from back to front.
Move in condition of garden area
Front view day we first viewed the house
To remove the southern portion, I had to cut the elderberries back severely, although they needed it. That seventy-foot section of fencing full of vines was quite heavy to drag the hundred and twenty feet to the back of the property, I can tell you. The scavenger wasn’t thrown off grabbing it for metal though. It was gone by morning.
The northern portion was a good hundred feet long. I managed to rip out the first forty feet before finding where the flora had too tight a grip on it. I’m not Conan, but I’m not a little guy either. I couldn’t get it to budge. I left it for winter to knock the plants down. On an incredibly mild February day (70+ degrees), I discovered the problem. The bottom six inches of fencing had sagged and become mired in the ground over the decades it had been there. It was several minutes of digging and brute force tugging at it before I got it loose. And maybe some swearing. And likely some cursing the people who neglected the property.
Of course, having to wait for winter meant I was cutting down the trees in the eighteen inches between our fence and the neighbor’s privacy fence, all the while watching which way they fell or swung because they were into the wires for our electrical power and cable. The old phone wires are there too, but Ma Bell is a legacy company for us. I have not had a hard wired phone for two decades.
By the start of the 2017 season, I had removed most of the weeds, the running-amok day lilies, and the trees, allowing us to start the garden with six ground level beds and ten feet of very short vertical space. I ordered some garden mix from a local garden supply company to fill in the few inches of soil stuck to the sod I’d removed and relocated to the bare areas I’d created in ripping out the weeds. With the eight-by-four beds now full of rich, black soil, my friends were joking they looked like alien graves.
Filled beds or alien graves???
First season vertical garden
First season, July from the west
First season, July, from the east
Season one herb bed
That left the fence posts. Having them pulled by a service would mean spending a lot of money. So we left them for another day. Then Beth saw a hack online. For $40, we bought a two-ton car jack. You dig away any debris around the cement holding the post, then position the jack on a board, which is on a pair of cinder blocks, so that it reaches the pole but does not hinder pulling the concrete out, and soak it for several minutes with your garden hose. Put a big pipe wrench on the jack to grip the post and crank the jack. Lo and behold, the first post popped right out and I lugged it to the back, where a scavenger took it concrete and all.
That was the front post on the south side where the elderberries had been. We left the others to use as the posts for a Concord grape arbor. The elderberries are being relocated to garden north (see last month’s postings for what I mean by garden north). The posts on the north side of the house would be a different story.
We understand the house was built in the 1950s by a doctor, who had a few, shall we say, unique ideas about how a house should be built. Perhaps this is why the basement bathroom was not done correctly and the fence was inside the property line. From my years with a Chicago law firm, I became aware of a few quirky physicians in this area. Malpractice insurance rates here drove their practice up into Wisconsin. (Seriously, it wasn’t them. It was the insurance.) Anyway, it means I have an idea of who might have built this house.
So it was only half a surprise when the fence posts on the north side gave us trouble. We pulled one, but only with the aid of our neighbor’s strapping, young son. The post had been secured with at least an entire ninety-pound bag of concrete plus a few large stones thrown in for good measure. We tried to pull two more with no success. They are too heavy for the hack. I will either have to rent a proper post puller in the spring or cut them off below ground level (which is probably what I will do).
The scavenger didn’t want that post until a neighbor took a power tool to the cement and broke it off for me in exchange for some of the sidewalk chunks I had left from replacing a sinking portion of the sidewalk and installing a walkway to the back. (Jackhammers are fun tools, btw.)
The back four of these posts became the base for our vertical garden back in 2017. I bought large electrical conduit, several connectors, and basic green-poly-coated fencing. I used a string to get a rough level line across conduit sticking upright from inside the fence posts to cut them off evenly with my pipe cutter. (I own most of these tools already.) I used the connectors as well as bolts to attach horizontal conduit bars across the leveled uprights. Locktite metal adhesive and JB Weld marine weld hold them together. The metal fencing hangs vertically from the cross pieces to create a sturdy, wire net for the plants. I painted the conduit and posts with two thick coats of Hunter green Rustoleum to match the fencing. It’s not an eyesore.
It cost under $100 and will last for many seasons to come.
We installed the raised garden beds over the course of three years to spread out the expense. We have eleven of them, eight-foot by four-foot and eight inches high. The vertical bed is fifteen inches wide and thirty feet long. Clearly, absent having dug a hole for a pool, we needed to bring in soil to fill them. I’ll do the math for you; each bed contains a full yard of garden soil (27 cubic feet) twenty-four cubic feet in the bed plus filling in the soil lost in removing the sod. The vertical bed required a little over a yard. We needed twelve yards of soil. I bought three the first year and five in each of the subsequent years, and this fall I added three yards of compost. Because bulk material settles over time despite loosening it in the spring while digging in the cover crop.
If you haven’t purchased materials in bulk, you need to. The cost is a fraction of the dozens of bags you would need to have delivered from the big box stores. Incidentally, the big box stores also deliver bulk materials, though for a higher price than you’ll find going local. I searched online and found a family run supply house a few miles away. Their garden mix (2 parts top soil to 1 part compost) was a little more than half the cost of what a big box store wanted just for unenriched top soil. The delivery price was half, and subsequent deliveries in the same season are discounted.
Over three years, I paid $111 the first year, $185 in the second year, and this year paid $279 total for soil delivered in April and compost in December. Altogether, we spent $575 on good quality soil and supported a local business. I also had about three yards from digging a trench for a walkway to the back, which has gone into new beds for strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and asparagus. Plus a big pile at the very back for potatoes.
Holy crap! You shout. $575 just for dirt!
Yes, and it was a necessary expense to become self-sufficient in organically grown vegetables. Could we have reduced the cost by not creating raised beds? Of course, we could have, though raised beds require less weeding, drain better, warm up sooner in the spring, and make maintaining the lawn between them much easier. We get better results for less effort, which is a huge benefit when you’re trying to produce as much as we do.
You may have noted I said organically grown, not organic. There is a difference. To be certified as organic, produce must be grown in pure, naturally enriched soil with pure, organic methods; no manufactured fertilizers or pesticides. There is some wiggle room on allowable contaminants, but naturally enriched soil means having no artificial fertilizers or pesticides tainting the soil, meaning the compost used needs to be made from clean, organically grown plants. Because I don’t know all of what went into the compost portion of my garden mix, I could not get my produce certified as organic. (Which is a big, expensive deal for commercial growers.) In a few years, when I’ve worked in enough of my own, properly created compost, I will claim to be growing organic produce. For the moment, I am organically growing produce.
To be thorough in costing, the wood for each bed was about $30, including the vertical bed, for about $360. So at this point we have spent, $100 (vertical growing frame) + $575 + $360 + additional wood for the berry beds = approximately $1100 in materials over the course of three years. That comes to roughly $367 per year to date.
What does that mean in terms of savings in reality? Have we saved any money? Per the USDA, the average American household spent about $766.50 on fruits and vegetables. Of course, we don’t yet grow many fruits. Packer, a produce industry publication computed average spending for fresh vegetables only at $259 in 2015. Quora put it at $234 in 2012. In 2018, per ValuePenquin, the figure was $236. But wait, there’s more. We also can and freeze our produce to last an entire year. Americans spend an additional $130 on processed vegetables per year according to Quora. Together, the average cost per household is $366.
That’s break-even on some very low sounding numbers. Next year the cost per year for materials will drop to $275 per year. In 2020, we will be saving money for certain based on these figures. However, these are not the figures for organic vegetables, nor are they specific to us.
So what about us specifically; our two person household? How much would we be spending on organic produce for an entire year? Taking average prices from the USDA National Retail Report – Specialty Crops of December 27, 2019, our desired outcomes for about two-thirds of what we grow (the rest wasn’t listed) comes to approximately $2,110 per year. Naturally, this estimate is inflated because these are year-end (out-of-season) prices. But if in-season prices are just 25% of these, the figure is still over $500.
I will recalculate these numbers over the course of 2020, using the lowest in-season prices, to figure how much we save in 2020 for all 77 items we currently have planned (including herbs).
Wait a minute, you say, what about the cost of seeds? My response is (or soon will be) what cost? We produce our own seeds. There are a few varieties, new additions, which I need to purchase. The cost of these is minimal, generally under $20 a year. Eventually, there will be no seed cost in some years. Seed starting trays and medium likewise run less than $20 a year.
Yeah, but you spent a lot on canning supplies and two canners, I hear you say. Our pressure canner cost about $75 and will last for many seasons. Our water bath canner is on its second year and was about $30. Mason jars are not one-and-done items. The jars and bands last for seasons. The lids cannot be reused, because you will never get another safe seal out of them. The cost is minimal though. For the sake of argument, assuming a ridiculously short ten-year useful life out of everything, the cost is perhaps $25 per year. Realistically, the cost per year should fall below $10 per year over the life of the jars, etc.
This year we are putting in a dedicated seed garden rather than leaving one or two plants after harvesting all of the others. This will allow us to begin generating seed for biennials such as carrots and beets. I expect the additional cost to be $90 to $100 for the wood and two yards of garden mix. Adding this to the twelve other beds will bring the cost of building the beds to $1200.
So how much have we spent?
Good question. We already had some of the materials and I’ve added more, such as tomato cages for $0.37 each on super closeout. We bought a wheelbarrow for $35 to haul the materials to the beds. We’ve purchased some low fencing and stakes and a few other items without keeping track of the expense. Of course, we bought seeds to get started, usually on preseason sale at a big-box store for 30% to 40% off, plus at closeout sales. In my experience, these seeds are no less productive than the pricey seeds from full-color catalogs. For specialty seeds, such as our dragon beans and carrots, we have gone to the catalog and online shops to start. I can only give you a best guess, which I believe is $1500 total for everything, including canning supplies and equipment.
So at this point, we’ve spent about $500 per year (including the seed garden to come), which is equivalent to my above estimate of how much we would have spent buying enough fresh, organic produce for an entire year. Next year, it becomes pure savings.
The Little Farm in Town 