I think a big question has to do to with what you normally spend money on. If you’re buying a lot of organic local greens, herbs, berries, fruits from fruit trees, heirloom tomatoes, and such, then you can make up the cost really quickly with gardening, especially if you don’t buy into all the stuff that you “need “. But if you’re normally eating a pretty low produce, or very cheap produce only diet, then while you’ll get a better diet out of it, it’s not going to save you any money.
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Yes. A garden that is optimized and looks nice and grows exactly what you like best? Probably not a great money saver.
Low equipment and buy some seeds or grow from kitchen stuff? Pretty good.
I saved pumpkin seeds, I’ll do dried beans, I have sunflowers and cottage garden flowers.
I’ll do some herbs and greens. Maybe save some tomato and pepper seeds.
This is our first year and we’re going to probably spend money starting the beds but I’ve never spent money on garden beds before. We’re saving coffee cups etc to start some of our seeds and if we buy trays etc then we will still be here and use them next year.
But my garden overall will cost a fton this year because I want stuff like a fire pit and a fire permit and trees. Ornamental trees. Fruit trees shade trees! A shed. A hot tub.
Fruit bushes the lazy way
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I garden an okish amount, but mostly not food, just ornamentals. For savings and convenience, we have rosemary and green onions. Other fruit producers are a lime tree and kumquat tree, and about a dozen blueberry bushes. The avocado, pomegranate and passionfruit plants have not produced yet. I used to do arugula from seed because it was easy and a big cost savings. The green onions, avocados, leek, and romaine lettuce (not currently growing) came out of food scraps.
I’m lazy and things get watered when the irrigation goes on and fertilized maybe one or two times a season. We’re too hot and in too much direct sun for a lot of things, at least without spending a lot more on irrigation. Plus produce is cheap here and we are rural ish enough that I can usually find a farm stand once the season really starts up. Much cheaper than the hoity toity farmers market.
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Also, there are a lot of things that I won’t buy at grocery store prices - I would never buy fresh basil because I think it is so, so expensive. But for $1 worth of seeds, I can have it fresh for months, until I’m pretty tired of it, and then freeze some for winter.
I am rarely willing to buy fresh raspberries because, yikes. But I planted 6 raspberry canes, and in two years I had all the raspberries I could eat, plenty to give away, and enough for jam.
And kale is practically a weed.
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I find gardening saves money, but costs time. I have saved money by picking up a huge Rubbermaid bin (think: for the back of a truck) on recycling day (it was by the curb for pick up), drilling drainage holes in the bottom and loading it with good soil.
Soil is the expensive part. If I knew what I was doing and was doing it in large quantities, I could mix my own. But having tried to do small scale gardening with bad soil before…well…I just won’t go there again. I wait for the good soil to go on sale and buy.
We’ve also bartered a chopped down tree for milled 2x6 and 2x8 lumber from a neighbour. That made a second raised bed.
Between the two raised beds, and the deck garden consisting of cloth pots and “unique” containers (including a galvanized pail), we are able to produce enough to see us through January at least. We are just reaching the bottom of our frozen greens. Will probably be out of them by the end of March.
Things that do well here? Peas, beans, radish, greens, herbs, beets, turnips, green onions, tomatoes. We eat the whole plant too. Beet greens are used in quiche. Turnip greens in stir fry. We grew Swiss chard and kale too. We have everbearing strawberries in a pot.
We cannot get a squash to grow for love nor money! I think the containers are too small and they aren’t fed enough. We did get miniature zucchini once, when we planted it in the middle of the yard surrounded by compost. But that was about it.
Also, don’t forget what you can grow in the house - microgreens, sprouts, etc.
We also barter with family and friends.
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I finally made muffins after being out of granola bars for a week and craving cake for most of the week! I did carrot muffins and should have dialed up the sweetness, but they are done and taste good and take away from my need to go out and get convenient food. I think muffins need to be a staple again for a while.
I’m also considering cooking from a cookbook for a while. It could be wildly ambitious, but I’m also just so burnt out on my staples. If I have the energy, tomorrow I’m doing a mushroom pate instead of hummus. Because I need something as easy as hummus and I feel like I never want hummus again.
What do you guys do when you are sick of everything you make?
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I usually browse my favorite food websites, like Serious Eats, or I’ll read through Smitten Kitchen to see if she’s made anything new that seems fun to make. Sometimes I’ll browse actual cookbooks that I own but I feel a lot less inspired when there aren’t pretty pictures I can scroll through on the internet. I also have a habit of bookmarking recipes all the time even when I have no immediate plans to make them, so when I feel really bored/uninspired I will revisit those to see if there’s anything that grabs me. Sometimes what happens is I read through the recipe, decide it’s too complicated and I don’t want to try that hard, and realize that I’m happy with my same old easy food after all, haha
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I went through a large portion of the back catalogue of recipe tin eats a couple months ago because I felt like I was in a rut and tried to pull together meal options (because when I’m actually hungry and stressed going from “here’s a recipe for some salmon” to “here is a balanced meal with vegetables” feel too hard sometimes. My standouts from the things I’ve eaten off the list since then were:
Lime Chicken (marinade - great for grilling!) | RecipeTin Eats with Coconut Coriander/Cilantro Lime Rice | RecipeTin Eats and something like Asian Slaw - healthy, crunchy Asian Cabbage Salad | RecipeTin Eats
and Pear Salad with blue cheese | RecipeTin Eats with Lemon Garlic Marinated Grilled Pork Chops | RecipeTin Eats and optional bake-in-the-oven bread if I needed carbs
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I also like browsing my favourite cooking websites. My contribution is that I may buy a few fancy tasty items and drop any I’ve had too many of recently, like rotating through dried cranberries OR olives OR some other tasty item to go in my salad. And so if I’m on olives, I drop cranberries from my food for a week. That can make the staples that go with the flavours more palatable again.
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In addition to what’s already mentioned, I try to break out to a different format or flavors I don’t use that often. A lot of times we do ___ and noodles, or ___ and rice, so instead I might make a roast chicken and vegetables (different flavors for the roast chicken over time) or pita pockets. Soup and grilled cheese sandwiches can also work but our weather is frequently too hot for soup. For flavors, pesto or sun dried tomatoes in paninis are yummy and then we have easy rice packet things that we make as the side dish.
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Thank you everyone!
@meerkat and @ladyduck especially thanks for the easy wins - changing add ins and changing the side
Plans for this next cycle, some already started
Homemade energy balls instead of larabars
Homemade muffins for snacks and breakfast
More smoothies
Altered spread and toppings
-veggie pate
-black bean dip
-sunflower seeds
-cranberries
- a hot pepper of some kind
-cilantro chutney
Batch side dish
Mashed potatoes
Easy on hand things
Bean burritos (oops ate them all)
Veggie burger patties
Vegan creamy spread
Tinned fish, hard boiled eggs, cheese, a sandwich meat
Dinner meals
Mashed potatoes with veggie burgers and fish
Pizza stir fry
Pasta with cauliflower cream sauce
Big salad with sunflower seeds and eggs
Shepherds pie
And we need a huge superstore shop where we get lots of extras so we aren’t living on just basics that I get sick of 
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So, a cross country move is really fucking expensive, WHO KNEW.
I admit I haven’t been watching things like grocery costs much. We had to do a huge restock upon moving, though we did take what nonperishables we could cram in the car. I’m actually back to meal planning now, sort of, and honestly, our food spending isn’t terrible considering we had basically no pantry/fridge/freezer stash upon our arrival. I’d have to look back at receipts but I think we’re at around $350-ish since moving. This is also because there is no Aldi here so we have shopped mostly at Winn-Dixie which is just a regular grocery store. We did sign up for their rewards so we get discounts.
Impacting our food efforts is the fact that we don’t have much in the way of food storage in this sublet. While the kitchen’s well equipped there are only a few tupperwares and they don’t close securely so no good for freezing. I have a few mason jars on me, which contained jam and tomatoes that have been eaten, but I didn’t bring rings. So that’s been a pain in the ass, I like to batch cook and stick it in the freezer for later. We finally bought tupperwares (which we did NOT need, we have tons in the pod) just so that I can freeze food. First I got some on Buy Nothing but OMG, they smell sooooo awful. I’m gonna run them thru the dishwasher a couple times but if it doesn’t go away I’m going to have to just recycle them. What died in there??
Anyway, meal planning:
- I still have 3 things of crockpot lentil curry in the freezer, that made a ton.
- Last night I made veggie fried rice and mushroom cream pasta.
- Do something with the black beans I cooked. Burrito bowls maybe?
- Vegan fish tacos
- I have a package of tofu that I need to use up, not sure what to do with it. Maybe green curry tofu?
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Try a vinegar rinse on the stinky tupperware. Might have been used for something like kimchi. I’m not familiar with dishwashers (okay, so roll your eyes). They are technology and DH insists on being the person to use it. Who am I to complain?! 
But soaking them in a sink of warm water with 1/2 to 1 cup of vinegar might do the trick.
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I found some Christmas soaps bar soap online clearance for $6.95 for 28 oz. That’s even cheaper than buying Olay bulk bars. The most christmasy thing seems to be the illustrations on the wrappers, the scents are Frangipane, Quince, Gingerbread, and Orange Spice which should be fine.
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Ah, good idea! Need to get some vinegar.
I used the last of ours to clean out the coffee maker I scored at a yard sale yesterday. Got that and a nice toaster for $10 total. This crosses 2 things off of our moving-needs list, we tossed ours because they were old and dying.
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As someone from the US, with very midwestern parents, I had zero idea what Frangipane or Quince were until I watched the Great British Bake Off. I’ve still never eaten either of them, and I have no idea what their candles would smell like, lol. It’s so weird to me that those are “standard” Christmas smells somewhere.
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Frangipane is a sweet almond confection, so… sweetened almonds. 
It’s a nice smell for sure.
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I love marzipan and almond paste-based things, so I imagine I’d enjoy it. I just can’t muster up the courage to try to make it myself 
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Just finished cooking for today (still have two loads of laundry going, then I’ll be fully done with chores for the day) so thought I’d hop on and share some food pics from the last little while! I’m trying to eat down my freezer/pantry.
Food pictures
From the other week when I made biscuits; I also defrosted this creamy corn chowder. I still have 2 gallon bags left, but it goes really quickly.
Standard husband frittata with sausage and hash browns. Frozen hash browns are the best! I used to cook potatoes for his frittatas, which added a whole other element to his breakfasts each week, but now I just layer in the frozen taters and bake them as is (I still pre-cook and drain the sausage tho).
Also trying to eat down my freezer chili! I had tortilla chips with it too (plus the spanish rice) and I’ll keep eating this all week for lunch. Sorry for the dirty spoon I forgot to take a nicer pic, lol.
Fried rice! To go with:
More Thai curry (potato, tempeh, carrot, cauliflower)! Haha, I know it’s kind of odd to have Thai curry with fried rice but like I said I’m using up freezer and pantry odds and ends so we are LIVING ON THE EDGE over here, hahaha. This curry turned out really well, I used my last 2 cans of pumpkin in it (plus some coconut milk). I also used up the last two tempehs I had in the freezer!
This is from last week/the weekend. I decided to try out these pre-made crusts from Aldi (Mama Cozi is the brand, I think? Something like that.) and my review is…they’re ok? They’re easy and I think they’d be a godsend if you have kids, each crust comes with a little sauce packet and then you put your own toppings on. I added extra homemade sauce because it seemed a little stingy and then did hawaiian toppings (but with vegetarian lunchmeat). I still have a few in the freezer because husband adorably misunderstood quantities on this one, lol, he bought me like…a whole fucking lot of these.
I didn’t say anything but fortunately he really liked these so I’ll probably use them up as an easy lunch for him in the future.
I made this today and husband already tasted it and declared it “incredible, so good, can I have this soon?” I cooked up the last frozen brisket I had and then whipped up some bbq sauce. I mixed it with one of those raw slaw mixes from Aldi (it’s mostly green cabbage) to cut the fat and sugar a bit and I’ll be rolling them into wraps with cheddar cheese for his lunches. Today I packed him veggie burger wraps instead since I didn’t have the meat cooked, but it was the same idea (bbq sauce and slaw and cheese)- so veggies might like that option!
I might make bagels later in the week? Time will tell…
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meal planning. my preferred chicken was on sale, so we got two.
Monday: breaded chicken, lettuce, maple mustard dressing
Tuesday: yaki udon with cabbage and ground pork (Yaki Udon (Stir Fried Udon Noodles) - RecipeTin Japan)
Wednesday: roasted chicken, brussel sprouts, gruyere
Thursday: sweet potato home fries, tomato shashi paneer
Friday: zucchini paneer fritters
lunches
- kimchi egg fried rice
- soft boiled eggs on toast, dukkah
- udon kimchi stir fry (Kimchi Udon Noodle Stir Fry - My Korean Kitchen)
otoh my yogurt is expensive now, like $3.69/750ml, so the fancy yogurt at $3/500ml seemed like a much better plan (even though fancy yogurt is flavoured, and can’t be used as an ingredient and the cost per ml is still better for the regular).
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