Two of Me

Ok, I'm a terrible blogger. I blog once a month if I'm lucky these days. I let my domain name expire and some one purchased it so now there are two of me, one being my evil doppleganger with not a whit of humor or spark. I guess that's what I get for being lazy/busy.

Saving Money on Organic Food

I've been looking over my food budget and J & I spend a ton of money on food every month - basically it rounds out to $600 a month for 2 people on all organic/grass fed meat/ raw milk - food.

Some of this is due to easy convenience foods for J as his job is very physically demanding and he has certain things he has to "have" like red bull (which is bloody expensive for sugar and caffeine) ,which, yes, is not organic and I wish he wouldn't drink it, but he has to have it. BTW has anyone tried Yerba Mate? I've heard that it gives people more energy. He also drinks a crap load of beverages i.e. blue sky soda (which I am trying to ween him off of as his stomach can not handle the acid) . I have my vices also, like New Season cookies and kombucha.

However, I would like to start trimming our food bill down considerably. I took the Sustainable living on a budget class and learned a few tricks but it mainly focused on eating seasonally and removing yourself from the monster machine of commercialism and stuff' (this, of course, lead to an all out fight between J and I about tin foil - He loves it. I hate it and I want to switch to cloth napkins to wrap his sandwiches and glass containers for his other food. He won. But only because it can be recycled.)


On my quest to save money, I really lucked out by stumbling on a small co op of moms that buy food in bulk from Azure Standard and split it, therefore reducing any store mark ups and making organic food cheaper. The have created a really neat system where they post items they would like to split like Organic white flour that is not enriched (do you know how hard it is to find this? It's like finding a pot of gold). For a 50 pound bag it's $37.60 which makes it 76 cents a pound (PDX prices). This is split among interested parties. When I found them they were on Meetup as a food group but now they moved to their own snazzy website. I've tried to convenience my sister to do something like this in Tucson so her family can afford organic foods but she's just like - too much work.

This co op has also started offering produce as the founder did some digging and found the organic distributor in the area and opened an account. Some of the prices are fabulous - $3 for 4lb bag of organic Valencia oranges and .55 cent a lb for organic red potatoes. They just started offering produce so I'm excited to see how this affects my bottom line at the end of the month.

I'm also looking at going in with some of the ladies and splitting a whole cow/hog. We just purchased a chest freezer and I'm ready to start filling the sucker. Get Rich Slowly has a nice post about this process. I really like the idea of doing this as I have some control over what the animal is eating and how they are treated.

The last way I'm trying to go about saving is by doing what my grandma did - make things from scratch. My weekends are slowly filling up with making the food we eat - granola, kefir, sourdough bread, fermented ginger beer (this didn't turn out as great as I thought it would), ketchup (NT recipe). I'm lucky I have time to do this but I was thinking about trying to get a group of people together to make mass quantities of items so we could all get lovely food and not work the month of way in the process. I'm going to try my hand at kombucha and see what happens.

F o o d

Everywhere you turn you keep hearing how food prices are going up. Milk is up, rice is up, corn is up. I recently read this story discussing how this is affecting many families and it made me pause and look at how our food economy is tied together with the price of fuel, the governments subsiding of crops and how stepping away from our food process had made us more vulnerable.

When was the last time you bought something from the store and could tell where it was made. Sure it's says Kraft but is it ok with you if the meat comes from Mexico and the spinach comes from China? Would you stop buying food if you saw on the label that it was made with genetically modified products? I watched The Future of Food and was disgusted by how our food system is set up and how Monsanto, quite frankly, is evil.

I don't remember the last time that I bought a gallon of regular milk from the store. When I was a vegetarian I eschewed milk and drank soy, eat soy not realizing that soy has it issues. (Please if you are new parent and considering feeding your child soy formula please read this)

Last night I called my mom because my dad drinks a gallon of milk a week (we call him our baby cow) and found out they spend $1.50 for a gallon of milk. That doesn't seem right. Can a dairy farmer make a living and only charge $1.50 for a gallon of milk? What did that farmer have to do to the animals to make it so affordable?

I've been trying to get my parents and sister to start drinking raw milk but it's cost prohibitive for them. I spend $10 for a gallon of milk to drink and make kefir & kefir cheese from. I had to cut some things out of my budget to make this work but it is important to me.

I am so frustrated right now with all this information that I'm finding out about. I've made strides to eat organic but not really understood all the arguments surrounding it. Are we really getting what we pay for?

Open your mouth and say "Ah"

J has gone and broke our dang piggy bank.

Both J and I are very adverse to doctors and dentists. Call us lazy, call us chickens but that last thing either of us want to do is have someone else poking around in our business. So a month ago J says "my teeth are bugging me" and I talk to a couple of coworkers and find a dentist that they recommend who lives near us and J goes in to get checked out.

Now mind you, this is the Monday after the tax stimulus hit our bank account and we bought a chest freezer ($208 - yeah! I have wanted one of these forever and we are going to be buying a 1/4" a cow that our friend is raising for us) and on the spur of the moment bought a wii, video games and camping equipment burning our "free" money that was supposed to be put into savings into ashes (well 1K was supposed to go into savings - the chest was planned).

Anyhow J calls me after his appointment sounding like the walking dead and tells me that he has three cavities and has to get two crowns for a total of ..... $2500 (this is after his insurance pays their part). There goes the piggy bank and any trips/vacation that we had planned for the year.

Jedi Gym

I found this funny video on you tube and I just had to share

Raising Backyard Chickens

In February we made the plunge and purchased our first three hens. I found a farmer in Mollala and bought three buff orpingtons - Rosemary, Sage and Thyme. Cost for chicks - $10. A week previous to that I had purchased the items to make up their brooder (large clear plastic bin, heat light, feeder, waterer and pine) - $30. I made the mistake of buying some of these items at pet food stores where the cost is marked up a lot - if you decide to go this route go to your local feed store. The prices there are amazing. You will not find better quality for a better price.

Anyhow, while they were in the brooder I started building the chicken tractor. I first searched for cheap plans and found this one for $15 on Ebay. I had tried to go the route of checking out books from the library but none of the ones I could find had step by step instructions. It took me a month to build and it cost $150. I purchased everything from Lowes. I did try to go the route of hitting up the local rebuilding center and re-habitat store to find used material and I could not find anything I needed, and to tell you the truth, I was frustrated by how difficult it was to find anything.

Right now their current cost of upkeep is: organic chicken food (50lbs for $22), grit ($1.00 [10 cents a scoop]) and pine $10 for 30lbs.


Raising chickens has been a wonderful experience. J & I love nothing more than to sit outside and watch and cluck at the chickens. However there were a couple things that I was not expecting.

1) Chickens can be kinda gross - like they love to roost and crap in their food and water. This used to drive me nuts when they were in their brooder. They love to make a mess. They also a particular smell that made me so much happier when they were outside.

2) When placing chickens in their tractor for the first time they will have no idea what the heck that ladder is that goes into their coop. They will think it is an alien life form and avoid it at all costs. You must be the momma and delicately walk them up and down it so they understand its purpose. (I had to block the underneath shade area for a month so they would understand to go into their coop at night)

3) You need to spend a lot of time with them to tame them. I had read that the breed I picked was extra cuddly and, hrmm, they are not. They are not mean. They just still regard me as someone who will eat them, although now that I feed them worms they have this gleam in their eyes whenever I get near their tractor.

Here is a great site that I reference quite a bit - Backyard Chickens.