I was reading a very nice article in the latest Earth Garden magazine (No 184) by Rachel Altenbacher where she ate only out of her garden for a month. This included a 7.5 x 2.5m veggie patch, produce from her orchard and chooks and some other pantry and swapped items. I thought this was an intriguing idea. I am also about half way through David Holmgren’s book “Retrosuburbia” in which he talks about a “Home-based lifestyle” which I also found intriguing.
We decided to synthesize these and a few other ideas (it dovetails well with Plastic Free July and Zero Waste) together and came up with “No Buy July”. The idea of no-buy July is to just use what we have on the property as much as we can for the next 31 days, so that we can -
Reduce unnecessary consumption and with it, waste – I think we are pretty frugal, but I want to test that theory and at the same time challenge ourselves to be more resourceful and innovative with what we have.
Save money – We have a fixed amount of cash to live on and we need to get the most out of it.
Make best use of existing resources – We do rely on our own resources but I feel we could do better and by focussing on doing better we will -
- Learn new ways of looking at things
- Learn new skills
Have fun – I think that by challenging ourselves to better we can have a lot of fun rising to that challenge.
What about the extra stuff can’t produce?
We have allocated $50 per week maximum, which we won’t touch if we don’t have to but can cover minor unforeseen shortages.
Exemptions
There are a number of exemptions to the no buy rule being mainly -
- Pharmaceuticals
- Regular bills (energy, water etc)
- Gift cards, birthday money etc accumulated prior
Petrol
Just to make things interesting I have allocated 1 tank of petrol for the month, which I topped up on the afternoon of June 30th. We usually go through a tank of petrol every one to two weeks, so this will encourage us to use walking, biking and public transport more. I still want some petrol available for things like our monthly permaculture Sydney West meeting, which is at night and we have a whole stack of crap to take with us. Travelling home on bus and train at 10:00pm loaded to the gunwales with PSW gear does not exactly thrill me.
How will we do it?
Home Harvest
We only have our 600m2 block to draw from, but having said that it does provide us with fruit, veg, herbs and eggs. The chooks are firing pretty well at the moment and giving us 2 eggs a day, we have lots of citrus: lemons mandarins, oranges and limes and all the usual herby suspects are available from the herb “wedding cake” and other parts of the garden.
In terms of veg we have lots of leafy greens with silver beet, bok choi, tatsoi etc and some brassicas such as cabbage, kale, broccoli and cauliflower starting to come on. We also have celery, snow peas, water chestnuts, lettuce, carrots, chokoes (of course) and Jerusalem artichokes. Unfortunately we have just run out of home grown onions, until the next crop come in.
We do also make use of wild greens like sow thistle, wild lettuce, mallow and dandelion which we mainly harvest from around the yard but can also forage.
Shopping in the Pantry
We have a fairly comprehensive pantry anyway and have recently been getting back into bulk buying to reduce costs and packaging waste. We have a bulk supply of flours, whole wheat (plus we have a nice electric grinder), skim milk powder and now we have red kidney beans and black beans as well as our own home preserved tomato pasta sauce and diced tomatoes. We don’t grow enough potatoes so buy them by the bag (organic) through our friends Greenhills organics. A bag usually lasts us about 2 – 3 months and we restocked a couple of weeks ago.
Doing stuff we know how to do but stopped
In the past we used to make bread a lot more and make our own pasta and the like but due to a number of factors like too much to do (and laziness on my part) we don’t do as much of anymore, so that is going to re-start.
Doing stuff we haven’t tried before
I want to give some new stuff a try, like using our stored skim milk to make ricotta cheese (for homemade ricotta and silver beet ravioli or tortellini) and Greek style yoghurt. I like sour cream on our home made Mexican bean tortillas, but I want to try substituting with homemade Greek style yoghurt and see how it goes. Also we want to try new vego/vegan meals to widen our repertoire.
Freezer
Which I suppose brings us to meat. We have some in the freezer but our current meat consumption is down to one or two nights per week, so I don’t see this is a big issue. It has been interesting to note that with the reduction of the importance of meat, the freezer has become a less critical piece of equipment for us too. Once upon a time we would buy a side of beef (pasture fed) a side of lamb and/or pork and some chook bits. If we were to do that now the meat would go out of date well and truly before we could use it. So it is more a case of buying stuff as we need it.
We also have some (homemade) ready meals in the freezer if we do hit a patch where we don’t have time to cook, reducing the likelihood of dipping into the cash reserve to get takeaway.
Shopping at the Shops
We did one last “standard” shop on the Saturday. It covered the stuff we would buy on a usual grocery shopping trip, although the variety and volume of stuff we have been buying over the years has declined somewhat due to the bulk buying and home production.
So there you have it! We are ready to go “home based” and see where that takes us. I am looking forward to the challenge, and also having the time to do more “from scratch” stuff as well. I am hoping that being barred from that quick trip to the shops will make us more creative, and as a by-product make things more fun and satisfying when we rise to the challenge.
To find out how it all went, click here.
