2009 save money challenge update. July.
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Save Money | 17 comments
Photo: Evening sky in Cheveley
I was going to post about our “save 50% in 2009” challenge. We are achieving it and are not weeping by the checkout in any local supermarket with the horror of it all. That’s why you haven’t had a smug monthly update.
If we had to halve what we are spending now it would be a totally different story. I’m pretty sure that we couldn’t achieve that challenge. Our spending is around £50 a week for everything (from loo rolls to matches). It means that we focus on the condemned food counter and slashed priced offers. A freezer is essential at the moment. Wine is now just an occasional treat.
Saving money takes time and energy. Danny does a mail run to Newmarket everyday and so can bob into the shops looking for bargains.
For ages I have mulled over Domingo’s comment in Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart. The neighbour was amazed that Chris and Ana were going shopping. He reckoned that it was a pointless waste of money as all the people in the district had everything that they needed to keep going and generally didn’t own a fridge or a freezer. OK their diet was mainly home cured ham and potatoes but it got me thinking. The community grew a lot of vegetables and also kept sheep and goats – milk, cheese and meat in season.
Now I’m looking at what we really need to buy, rather than what we want to buy.
Our monthly essentials are milk, coffee, tea, butter, flour, sugar, rice, spices, olive oil, salt, vinegar, lentils, cheese and meat and a few vegetables to supplement our own.
We could lay the front garden to wheat but I doubt that we produce enough flour to feed our bread sauce habit essential with roast chicken). We could use easily use our own honey rather than sugar to sweeten things, so this can be struck immediately off the list. We could keep a goat and make butter and cheese – when I have a bit more time, I’d love to keep a Nanny goat. Super fresh goat’s milk, yoghurt, ice cream and cheese doesn’t taste goaty and is far healthier than cow’s milk. Which is lucky as we don’t have the space for a cow just yet.
We could even grow our own lentils. We make quite a lot of fruit wine so perhaps we could make our own vinegar too.
But branded tea and coffee would be impossible to supplement. My parents were stationed in Germany, just after WW2, and discovered that coffee was an extremely valuable commoditize. My parents bartered a pound of coffee for a Min Pin puppy. In the UK today a superb pack of coffee might set you back £6 and a Min Pin pup costs the guts of £600.
Within the last five minutes I’ve discovered that it’s possible to grow tea in the UK. The problem is that I’ve never been very good with Camellias.
So if we raised more vegetables it would be just the meat, coffee, rice, flour, salt, olive oil and spices that we needed to buy. And there’s the rub – would we have time to get to the shops with all the tilling and hoeing required?
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m growing one of Tregothan’s estate’s camellia sinensis plants:it is VERY slow growing,much slower than my plants of camellia japonica. At the current rate- three “tips” this year, it will be well over ten years before I have enough to make a pot of tea. So I would not reccomed it as a money saving measure.
Have you thought about buying flour in bulk from a local mill?That’s what I do.If you bake very day you will be surprised by the amount of flour you get through. Its much cheaper and nicer than the stuff sold in supermarkets , though I suppose that Waitrose might be the exception;-) But I’ll bet your local mill-and I’m sure you will have one- would be able to beat them on price .
So, I’m not the only person with a loft full of special offer loo paper…extra insulation…
Well, you could always up the amount of bartering you do – 6 eggs for a bar of sap and suchlike….
You’re making me feel like a profligate spendthrift! We, too, are trying to minimize our grocery purchase, but I’m afraid my list inevitably includes chocolate (which we certainly can’t grow) and fruit (which we probably could, in time, if we had more skill and more sunlight).
One thing that isn’t on my list is salt. We’ve discovered that we can make our own. We heat primarily with a wood stove, and put a pan of seawater on top of it. The evaporation humidifies the house, and we’re left with a beautiful pan of snow-white sea salt.
If you’ve got a stove and access to clean salt water, then you, too, can save the 12 cents that salt costs, and feel mighty good about it.
chicery root and dandilion root are a decent replacement to coffee. not both together but seperate. maybe they’ll be nice together.
On the more mundane front, we use a local wholesaler (Makro) to bulk buy various essentials such as toilet, er, essentials and bulk buying vinegars for pickling and such. These items tend to be on a deal so we can stock up 12 months worth of stuff at around 40% of the retail price. And just civilisation entirely collapse, we’ll been fine for bog paper!
(BTW – found this blog last week searching for Damson Wine, just received a beginners fruit wine kit in preparation for the August Harvest after your wonderful experiences. Have fun – S)
I think as with most things it always needs money.
I have spoken to people and watched programmes on self sufficiency and it seems that however much you grow veg/murder your pets…I mean livestock
🙁 you still need cash for some stuff.
It was probably ok in the ‘oldun days’ to have clothes that were grey and like cardboard as they had been pounded on 2 rocks in the nearby stream but it doesn’t go down too well arriving anywhere in the ‘normal’ world looking like stig of the dump and smelling of carbolic soap.
I think the answer must be to produce an excess of what you do need and sell or swap it for things you can’t produce, or trade your skills for cash or goods.
I’d quite happily, like you, keep chickens for the eggs but could never eat one of them, and would definately want a pig, but couldn’t look at it as it got fat on leftovers thinking about a nice baked ham and roast loin of pork!
We all hanker desparately after the simple life but personally it would still have to include fabric softner and hair serum, and with all the best will in the world I’m not doing my laundry using a tin bath and a mangle.
Reckon the Min Pins would need to contribute too. Pity you can’t capture their energy. And if only I could generate power from Zebby’s extreme purring sessions.
Ah, we can dream…….. and laugh too.
care and huggles to all the birds and dogs, care, huggles and love to Fiona and Danny,
Michelle xxx
(Zeb is asleep – slap/bang in the absolute middle of the bed, and I’m chuckling away)
We have a vinegar maker which is quite good; I haven’t tried making fruit wine vinegar but very cheap wine works fine (currently using €0.89 wine from our last holiday).
You could have one vegetarian day a week . . .
You could drink herb teas. I couldn’t do without my black tea but I don’t mind the odd cup of fresh mint or lemon balm tea to supplement my tea.
I experimented yesterday with making pasta from buckwheat. I had to first grind the flour and then make the pasta, it was so late by the time I made it that we ended up at the local hotel as I hadn’t got around to picking the veg for our evening meal, so will actually try it out tonight. The idea was that even if we couldn’t grow the right kind of wheat here in Latvia, we can definitely grow buckwheat – pity I learnt to loathe it as a rice substitute in itself after an overdose of the stuff in one camp.