Update on our Second Year

We're well into our second year without grocery stores. Things are going pretty well, so well in fact that I still have absolutely no desire to step foot again in a grocery store. Being able to go to restaurants once a month is definitely helps though. It gives us a little bit of a break from having to cook all the time.

For the garden we've decided to switch things up a bit. We don't have much growing right now so we've decided to split the garden in half to maximize our fall harvest. One half will be for Spring crops and then the second half will be Summer crops. Then the side that was for Spring crops will become Fall crops. Next year the Summer crop area will be Spring crops and the Fall area will then become Summer crops. It does mean we'll have less to harvest during the Summer, but definitely will provide us with more food in the fall and winter. All of our seeds for the coming year so far have cost us about $120. I'm sure I'll be ordering more - I always do because we always end up with some failure that I have to replace.

Another thing I've noticed is that we're still spending a lot less money on our food. Even less than we were during the first year. Now that we're in the swing of things I'm finding we're only really going to the farmers' market and I'm not ordering from the buying club every month. I'm also going to be cancelling our CSA due to some issues I'm having with their billing practices. We were mostly just getting dairy items from them.With the goats producing 1-2 quarts a day of milk there are just a few things we need like cream and butter and that's not that often. I have another non-grocery store source where I can get those so I'm just going to cancel the CSA.

Right now we're probably only spending an average of $50/week on food, which is pretty minimal, especially considering our garden isn't really giving us anything. I'm feeling really good where we're at so on we will continue.