First, SORRY this post is so late getting up. Had some connectivity issues last night and most of the day today. That paired with snow and icy roads (discouraging me from making a quick trip to the library to get an internet fix) made me late. Guess that’s almost as good as “my goat ate my homework…”, but it’s true.
So, here we are, one week into this experiment, and we have already failed. I went to the store. Twice actually! The first time was to get some horseradish cheese for our New Years Eve party. It’s tradition, and I hadn’t managed to purchase it before swearing off grocery shopping for the month. (Don’t ask me to explain further, it is just one of those things that has to be there on New Years Eve.)
The second failure was this past Sunday. We were out of fresh produce. We live in a culinary waste land. This time of year, when all the local growers are hibernating, it is truly grim. Nothing “fresh” lasts two weeks. So we don’t stock up. Having some fruit and fresh veggies to eat keeps us healthier and isn’t something I’ll give up.
What we didn’t buy, even though we are uncomfortably low at this point, is snacks. No chips, no crackers, no peanuts, no Cheetos (much to the chagrin of RR who REALLY likes them.) We also didn’t buy any more coffee, oil, flour (though we are down to 10 lbs), yeast (can’t get bulk yeast locally, need to explore that more…), wine (that will hurt, eventually), or cream cheese (the bagels could be rather grim in the morning if the cow doesn’t freshen soon).
One of the things we have allowed our selves to become quite dependant on is fresh produce from the store. Some of the things we will never produce ourselves (nor will anyone in our local in any ecologically or economically viable way.) Other things we just got too busy to do. That has changed. When we decided to give up grocery shopping for a month we knew we would run out of fresh salad greens. (We didn’t expect it to happen quite as fast as it did, but… we knew.) So we planted a 3 foot window box full of arugula. It’s in the kitchen, behind the coffee pot (priorities!!!), under a grow light. We all love arugula, and it grows FAST.
January 3rd, 2010
January 4th, 2010
January 5th, 2010 – not quite salad yet, but almost.
This is one small step we have taken to reduce our dependance. There are others, but I’ll save them for another day.
There were so many great comments to my last post that I feel the need to address them in a new post rather than responding in the comments section. That will happen later this week.
I’ve never been to Italy, but I love to read about it. I don’t live on a farm and the closest thing I have self-sufficiency is my herb garden, but I love to read about farming and the new efforts toward stepping out of the grocery store line. This is me, dreaming. Well-written blogs on this subject are my new travelogues. Thanks for fueling my dream.
Yum, arugula! I would love to be more independent too and look for ways to do that more. But we still have the things that are hard to give up – for Dick it’s peanuts and swiss cheese and for me, it’s a brand of coffee which will remain nameless that I have delivered to my door. (Talk about a carbon footprint-I keep telling myself our cells make up for it.) Look at it this way, we are still doing better than most folks, so hang in.