Monthly Archives: June 2007

Food storage

I haven’t written much on food storage and frugality lately. Just haven’t had the money to stock up. We’d run things down below my comfort zone. So, since I did get the state tax refund, I went shopping on Saturday.

First stop was Bob’s Red Mill. I bought 25 pound bags of cornmeal, brown rice, popcorn and wheat. I bought white rice flour and coconut flour. Found some fruit spread without sugar for Jeffrey and also bought jars of sorghum and molasses. While I was wandering around, an older lady asked me about the bulk items. So I explained to her why it was a good idea and how we used this stuff. We still have beans left from purchases last year. So the grains really give us several months worth of meals.

Next was a trip to Costco, my first in years. The amounts they sell are almost scary. I did buy some basics like oil, powdered milk, meat and a few other things. Then I went to Gateway Produce where I pick up my tea. Also bought some bulk coffee and another jar of honey, plus some veggies. Finally, I hit Winco where I picked up anything missed in the other trips. It was tiring work and took some time to get everything put away at home.

It’s really worth it. If nothing else, we have food. There’s food for the animals too and I can use this bulk stuff for the animals if I have to. I can buy a few fresh items over the month and we’ll do fine. If you want to be able to get buy on very little, you really need to be able to stock up a few times over the year.

Goat kid update

We have this wild herd of little goats right now. I expect them to jump on the car any day now. We still have one of last year’s kids, Frodi. He’s never going to be very big and has a crippled front leg. It’s funny to watch him play with the other kids. Jeffrey is planning to keep the buck orphan kid for a cart goat (yes, he still wants a cart goat.) Is calling him Ragnarok I think. Since this one is bottlefed, he’s easy to work with. The orphans all run up to you and try to nurse on your knees. The formula seems to work pretty well as they are comparable in size to the kids raised on mom’s milk.

We also have a sitting goose, which means we can let the geese out and they won’t bolt for the neighbors’. It would be nice to have a clutch hatch out. Likely we’ll have one or two again, just like with the chicks. And the chicks are still with us and growing by the day.

Site changes

I’ve decided to make this site a blog only. I’ll need to update a few more things to have all the links working correctly. I just don’t seem to have enough time to do the work on the site that I’d like to do. So I can at least stay in touch this way. I’ve gone back to Blogger on the Spindlitis site and have my fiber and GTD blogs going again. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add some content there. I like having the Thoreau blog, but I guess I really don’t need it. Still, I’ll do my animal updates and random thoughts here for now.