A weekend of produce!

On Friday evening, Jean invited us to visit her farm. She lives a few miles out of town and it was a thrill to see that someone we know has managed to grow all kinds of fruit, vegetables, flowers and even chickens! Frannie had a blast winding through the rows of produce, and picked an eggplant, some cucumbers, tiny cherry tomatoes, an okra, lots of flowers, some lettuces, herbs and a blue egg! Again we marveled at how different fresh home-grown veggies taste from the bland tasteless stuff we'd gotten used to at the grocery store.

I looked at the brick edging she'd done on most of the garden and thought to myself that perhaps maybe somehow we could do this in our front yard without annoying our Five Pts neighbors? Maybe if we put flowers all along the outside and hid the veggies on the inside. I am determined and I know that Jean will help me!

Saturday was another visit to the farmers market! This time, Jason was working so I had both the baby and my three year old to take to the market, but I was determined to go again after enjoying the feasts we had from last week's visit!

We arrived around 9 instead of 8 this time and while there was still plenty of produce, the crowds were definitely much bigger. We ran into my friend Didi It was so wonderful to see her after she'd been out of town and also a blessing since she could help me watch the baby while Frannie and I procured delicious fruits and veggies. We all enjoyed some time catching up in the shade with our scones, cookies and coffee.

When Frannie, Josie and I got home, we invited Rebecca and her daughter Ava over to enjoy some of our farmers market finds for lunch. We had a delicious salad plate and bunches of blueberries.

That night I wanted something easy and simple for dinner, so I dusted off the old

Moosewood Cookbook

to find recipes for my delicious fresh veggies from the farmers market. With just a can of kidney beans I made a delicious feast using the recipe for tangy baked beans slightly modified-- adding the yellow cherry tomatoes from Jean's garden, the leeks (sliced thin), onions, large canning tomatoes and garlic from the farmers market plus some cider vinegar (6 tsp), and 1 tsp each of dried mustard, cumin and chili powder plus salt and pepper. Instead of baking it I just put it on to simmer for awhile while the brown rice made. Add in the flatbread from Big City Bread and it's a simple delicious meal.

Again, a visit to our local market brought friends, food and entertainment for most of the day on a lazy Saturday!

Pinching Pennies (Again)

I am embarrassed to say I haven't thought about this kind of stuff since my early days at Headline News and living on Ramen noodles.
Anyone who knew me back in high school or college would laugh at my present condition-- I used to be so cheap that friends once gave me a coin separator as a present-- surely they wouldn't believe that I am having to relearn how to scrimp and save. But after nearly ten years with my husband who's theory for living is "if you have money you should spend it!" I have made the conscious decision to start over so my kids can learn what I learned from my Dad about saving money.

First week of frugality:

Monday

8AM
Made breakfast from the fridge with family (instead of Jittery Joes, Big City Bread or Waffle House-- and don't get me wrong, I LOVE all three and have spent most of my retirement brunching and having coffee there).
9AM
Packed pic nic for toddler and baby
915AM
Got in car to go to Library (free!) for story time.
Checked out books (free instead of the weekly $50+ at Borders)
1045
took my coffee card to the Jittery Joes for my last free one (for now-- the drive thru guys are like my best friends-- but as I calculated, the double latte with flavor is costing me approximately a grand a year? how can that even be possible. Just changing my drink to an iced coffee will save 50%). Frannie convinced me to get her a tiny milk
$1
11-2
Pic Nic at Memorial Park with friends. Shared food. Kids swing and run and see animals (Free instead of lunching somewhere)
2-4
nap
430 ice cream at Hortons. $1 per cone, three cones for family
$3
530
make dinner at home (free)
read stories
8-12 am
work on web design stuff
go to bed

total spent today
$4

reduced carbon footprint by (okay don't laugh at me, we have to start somewhere):

turning off car at drive thru bank and coffee shop
turned up thermostat to 78 at home
rinsed a few cups quickly instead of putting them in dishwasher
recycled bits of paper/tin foil and other little things that usually get dumped

free stuff:

checked out books for kids, self
free entertainment at library and park

Tuesday:

spent $1.50 on an iced coffee (actual cost is $1.75 but I only had six quarters with me and had to convince the salesgirl to give me more ice and less coffee for a smaller fee. I have to find her to give her a tip and the extra quarter next week. Jason asks if I will become a coffee whore.

Wednesday:

Took coupons to Target for diapers, wipes, baby food and paper towels.
Saved $15

Made AWESOME stir fry with vegetables from the farmers market, stir fry sauce from Moosewood vegetarian cookbook and Udon noodles mom gave us for Christmas. Totally delicious. Frannie even ate squash and zucchini which she's never liked before (when we used to buy it at the grocery store)

Thursday:

Walked to Earthfare for dinner necessities. Took my baggu bags so I wouldn't need any more plastic bags.

Saturday:

Went to incredible local farmer's market for the first time (see earlier post).


Sunday:
fought urge to go to brunch with the family;
made farmers market feast instead
spent day painting and playing in the yard
Savings $35

My first visit to the Bishop Park Farmers Market

Frannie and I headed out early today (Saturday morning) to go to Athens' relatively new Bishop Park Farmers Market. We took forty dollars in cash, a check, and two Baggu bags with a plan to pick up fresh, locally grown produce for the family.

I was amazed at the variety of fresh, delicious-looking vegetables. We picked out some items just based on color and size (tiny cabbages,  50 cents; bright orange carrots in a bunch, $2.50). I bought a cup of just-for-me dripped coffee from 1,000 Faces for $2.00. We chose a sourdough loaf, a big loaf of sweet white wheat sliced bread and a cranberry muffin for $8.50 sold to us by dad's pal from the Skatepark of Athens, Fredo, selling for Luna Bakery. We picked out two huge heavy bags worth of produce from the farmers sponsored by Farm 255 (Boo, Wilma's friend I recognized as the seller which I now realize is Daniel "Boo" Rotberg & Becky Fielding)-- we got 9 different kinds of squash-- striped, long, squat and acorny, green, yellow and so on; purple cabbage and green cabbage; radishes, kale, onions, garlic, tiny new potatoes-- all for about $25. Then we picked up some of the most delicious blueberries from another farmer... It felt like the most abundant harvest-- all grown nearby.

Then we played behind the market just next to the baseball fields for a while. Frannie ran back and forth and I enjoyed my coffee.

We still had to go to Kroger because I had spent all my cash (next time I will bring more-- afterall if the grocery store costs a huge ton, why not try to get as much as possible at the local farmers market)- we still needed eggs, meat and dairy which we could have bought at the market if I'd had more cash or another check.

After the outdoor farmers market, Kroger felt like an ugly warehouse full of dead stuff and waste (I watched the flower area worker tossing dyed hothouse flowers into the trashcan). Out of necessity we needed milk, formula and juice, and about three other items-- also cost $40.

We came home and made a delicious "home-grown" meal for Dad and commented on the amazing, different flavors.

The Athens Farmers Market will be our new Saturday tradition.

Sudden and Hard

Disclaimer: I am not yet living off the grid. A friend told me once that I need just have a positive intention and this alone will affect change. So my intention is one day to live off the grid.

This is what finally did it for me: the $300 basket of groceries.  I went to the local Publix last Friday for my usual week's supply of food, plus $30 worth of batteries, and did a total freak out at the checkout counter. '"There must be a mistake," I say to the kid behind the register...

"Huh?" sighs the checkout dude stretching out the very long receipt for me to see. There's no mistake. And yes, he says I am the hundredth person to ask that question today.

Previously $150 for a basket of groceries had seemed ridiculously high but it's an amount I am used to paying now that we have a variety of family members with various needs. Jason only drinks rice milk, I like fat free, my three year old drinks whole milk and the baby needs formula. You get the idea. We are a family of consumers in a country full of  them.

But could the cost of groceries literally have doubled in less than a month's time? 

And, do we really need four kinds of milk? 

This scary grocery store jaunt came just after I filled my tiny ten-gallon tank... for $52? (What used to cost $15 not three years ago, before the birth of my first child, is now nearly 4x as expensive?) We bought the "tiny" Honda CRV because it was the smallest of the SUVs. Now I wish we'd thought even smaller.

How can this be happening? How could I not have seen it coming? Everyone we knew in bigger cities had been asking us if we'd experienced the worsening economy yet in Athens. We hadn't felt the pinch in the past few years as many of our New York and LA counterparts had. And I have to say it has hit our small town sudden and hard.

I walk my neighborhood for exercise so I see what everyone is up to on a daily basis. Over the past few weeks (and yes it's literally weeks) the typical one or two for sale signs have increased by the dozen. People we know are getting offers they "can't refuse" and then downsizing or moving out of town-- does this mean foreclosure? 

When I moved to Athens from SF ten years ago, I had to wait an entire year to find ONE HOUSE for sale in Five Points. I bought my first home after I heard rumor of a listing through the third realtor I had hired. There was not even a sign out front. I bought it without seeing the inside which is something I would never do today-- but I really wanted a house on a particular street in Five Points and it was the only one I'd heard of on the market in over a year . 

Now when I take my morning walk it goes: three houses for sale, one not, four for sale, two not... 

Some of our restaurant-owner friends once envied for their seeming never-ending-stream of new stuff, cars, homes, rooms-to-go, new clothes, jewelry, multiple annual vacations... tell us of the 3x rise in operations costs due to the increased cost of food and transport. The stay-at-home-mom wives I know are looking for full time jobs. The restaurants and retail stores around Athens are empty. We went to Jason's Deli last Friday at 5:30 (Athens' family rush hour) where there's a huge and good salad bar and we were the first ones there. Only three other families entered the restaurant over the next hour. AC-a-blasting for no one.

I called my dad to tell him that groceries in Athens had doubled overnight. Gas had tripled in two months. And  for the first time in my working life, I was scared. He told me to buy a deep freezer and fill it up. He really knows how to save-- I don't know any other American who does.

Yes, I had my days of struggle back when I worked as an untrained camera operator on the overnight shift hoping to someday be somebody. I made minimum wage then and lived off of peanut butter and rice cakes. But I was raised knowing how to look at the right hand side of the menu-- it just seemed like another challenge to save money back then. I was young and everyone I knew was struggling.

But by the time my second job came around, Clinton was in charge. I arrived in California and my salary had literally tripled overnight. Three years later it doubled again. I traveled to Japan to design random tv-related stuff and stayed for 90 days in the Shinjuku Hilton, gratis with a per diem and a comped mini-bar. Since I had no expenses in Japan I came back with the mother-lode of cash. I saved enough money during the 8 years Clinton was president to move my stuff back across the country to Georgia, buy a new car with cash, take  a year off, and put $25k down on a house. I then landed a great job in my new tiny town at close to the same salary I'd had in SF with half the expenses. I saved a little over time, but not enough. But with times this good, who's worried about the future... right?

That is until Bush came into office. 

Since then I've watched everything shrink-- except inflation. Customer service was the first to go. With the downsizing of the corporations, and outsourcing to India it doesn't really feel like there was anything left worth spending money on. I've had to return two computers, a fan, a phone and some shoes because they fell apart within weeks of my owning them. Since then I've watched retail (and some food and drug) production moved to China. Every clothing item no matter whether from Wal-Mart or Macy's was coming from China and suddenly had a life expectancy of three washes. It was actually becoming depressing to go shopping-- half the stuff on the racks was already missing a button or had loose threads. Quality was zero but at least the costs were low, right? Even the drive-thrus-- once beacons of convenience-- were becoming mini windows of shame and misery. It felt like they were throwing the burger/taco/etc at me.

Everything is shrinking, tanking, falling...

But still. Even after gas skyrocketed I thought, well, we can work around that. At least we bought our plane tickets to the west coast for summer vacation last winter. It hasn't really effected us yet, right?

Then came the $300 basket of groceries.

It hit me so hard I made a pact on the spot.

As of July 1 I would (try to) stop spending money. I will eat what's in my fridge, pantry, freezer before buying anything else at the grocery store. We will limit ourselves to purchasing just dairy, some meats (twice a week) and fresh produce at the farmers market every Saturday. I will carpool. We will walk to the post office, bank, etc. I will stop buying drive through fancy coffee. No fast food period.

We'll find free things to do with the kids. I will cut back on my babysitter time. I will (heavy heavy sigh since we don't drink and it's our only escape) give up our weekly date night visit to the movie theater and instead watch movies at home. I will set the thermostat up to 78 (from the cold 70 I like in the summer). We'll use the fans if it gets really hot. 

We have to do this for July and then again when we get back from our trip out west. We bought our  plane tickets at the end of last year for $189 each! We planned this research and job seeking trip before gas prices went from $1.50 to $4! We had decided to take the kids with us to get a vacation in while we were at it. And the babysitter. Now I keep thinking SUV? Los Angeles? 5 people. $5/gallon. Arrrrr.

The thought now makes me feel a little ill. Thus the month of pre-travel deprivation .

I have done this for one day now but my thoughts are heading off the grid. My husband laughs but I am seriously researching solar power and so on. But we are both self-employed. We have two kids. And scary stuff is happening to our economy. It's time to do something.