Produce Cost Triple Over Night!

Originally posted by speculativeoptimist
Wow, well here in Oregon I just paid 3.26 for gas and went to the grocery store for fruit and veggies. I bought 2 good sized organic tomatoes and at the register they(2) came up as $11.25

I returned them, too much!
Time to get my own garden plot working again.

peace,
spec

edit on 11-2-2011 by speculativeoptimist because: (no reason given)

organic food is the biggest scam the food industry has ever come up with. how can something that is supposed to be all natural cost 3 to 4 times as much as a regular industry vegetable.

it should be cheaper since the farmer has less overhead. the most expensive things a farmer has to deal with is insecticides, herbicides and fertilizers.

since an organic farmer doesn't use these products he should pass on the savings to the consumers. instead the greedy crook is charging an unreasonable and criminal premium on something that basically requires little to no care.

if you have a house, plant your own vegetables and have real, healthy vegetables that actually taste like a vegetable instead of mass produced products that someone claims is organic and has little to no noticeable difference in taste with non organic versions.

reply to post by randomname


THat is not true. First off the seeds cost more, and harder to come by. Most every seed you find in stores is a hybrid.

Small farmers do not mass produce, which is where the savings comes from in regular farming., They still fertilize, it is organic also, and much more expensive. They tend to their plants and nurture, more than the stuff you get cheap in the market.

And that beautiful colorful organic heirloom tomato, was raised and pick at peak of it's life, not early and then sprayed with chemicals to colorize it.

ANd the taste, and nutrients....well they speak for themselves. If you don't like the price, yes, you'll have to grow your own, but they are worth it.

reply to post by Slan1


"You can make your own homeade yeast too"

Slan 1 can you please tell me how to do this? My plan is to have some yeast on store and keep a sour dough starter going (you only need one package of yeast and then you feed the yeast evey couple of days, it can last for years...if anyone wants a recipe let me know) but in the event that I am not able to I would really like to know how to do this. Thankyou.

For those stocking up on rice and beans. I have thought about this, to much prob. lol! You need to buy canned veg and/or fruit packed in water, if for anyreason there is a shortage of water (God help us) you will have something to cook the rice in without eating into your reserves of water as much, plus the rice will be tastier and more nutritious! Other things I have stocked up on are dried fruit, which can be reconstituted or eaten as is. Salt, clove and ginger to preserve meats if neccessary (if you douse thin slices of meat in soy sauce, clove and ginger and whatever you have on hand for flavoring you are likely to have more success in drying the meat as those spices and the slat are excellent preservatives) Also large jars for pickling, cheese cloth for drying. I have quite a stash of seeds in the freezer, I even have a huge bag of Rye seeds for some reason! I aso have been stocking up on evaporated milk rather than dried milk because alot of the dried milk I come across doesn't specify where it made.

reply to post by James1982


by golly you are right. coming over from another thread where OP discovered Quantum mechanics aplied to thought and how changing the past changes the future......Change not from anybodies pocket to mine....Lets mentaly change the heat back to heat, melt the frost and grow new crops......organic = grown with horse crap not nitrogen which is what horse crap is....yet you can eat nitrogen out of the bag...it will only burn but it isnt poison. Feed urea is 50% nitrogen they feed it to cattle where temps fet below freezing to keep the cattle warm.....think about that the next time you have to buy ORGANIC...........no pestisides different label all togeather

Originally posted by iLoGiCViZiOnS
reply to post by Rockpuck

 

One should have a good feel for his local surroundings because when it comes down to it you may have to be the hunter/gatherer for your family.

Lots of edible mushrooms in just about every region so its important to do your research for those plants you may have to rely on. Squirrels are edible but I really hope it don't come down to that ah?

I admit since moving to the Northwest (Oregon) I have absolutely no idea about what plants thrive here (though thus far I've deduced that everything does, it's impossible to kill roses here, and spring starts in February.)

My first year here I planned all my gardening as I did in Ohio, where I had done landscape work before and found to my dismay, climate changes everything.
Though my Apple trees more than thrived, I had more apples than I knew what to do with..
This year I have a large urban garden going on, it should be ready in about 2 months for full on planting.. I am planning on doing a thread here on ATS on how to plan and construct a urban garden in a small space, what to plant and so on. I can live without meat (trying to cut back) but when it comes to diets, some people cannot .. in a scenario where food cost soar (expect meat to rise because Feed cost are going up since the Corn crops were destroyed) meat will be very hard to come by, so people should plan on a mostly vegetarian diet.

Then with Gardening amateurs like me, my first garden everything came in at once, and I had so much I gave most of it away.. so people need to know about Drying, Canning, Preserving, etc. Farming is a hard job, and a heck of a lot harder than it looks, so it can be costly if you screw up. And I like Squirrels I'd really rather not have to eat one

Originally posted by Neopan100
WHAT do you do with 25lbs of flour? I mean without yeast what exactly can you make?

Unleavened bread is delicious and very easy to make. Take some flour, salt, some form of fat (butter, lard, shortening), a bit of sugar if you wish, and for an especially great taste, some milk (dry, canned, or otherwise) and mix it together. You now have a puck of dough that can be used to make fry bread if kneaded down by hand to minimal thickness of an inch or less or rolled out thin and fried for tortillas or baked at low temps for delicious homemade crackers.

Truth be known, growing up in rural New Mexico I ate more unleavened flour products (tortillas, Navajo fry bread) than I ever did traditional yeast leavened bread.

Other yeast-less uses for flour are making sauces & gravies, batters/coatings for meats, pancakes and biscuits made with baking powder rather than yeasts, and making your own pastas. The only suggestion I'd add to the "buy staples of flour" advice is to strongly consider also stocking unbleached and whole wheat flour. Enriched bleached flour has been largely sapped of it's natural nutrients and fiber.

Once you wean yourself off of the commercialized high fructose corn syrup toxins that are in the store bought bread, your taste buds will come to life and you will actually start to taste the natural goodness in natural wheat flour products made in the home. I went for a full year without touching any bread items that weren't made at home and even then, ate them in very limited fashion. I decided to dig into a platter of sandwiches at a business meeting last week and was shocked at how tasteless and crappy the bread tasted to me. I ended up picking at the cheese and meat on the sandwich and tossed the slices of bread in the trash. The caterer uses "Wonderbread" for their sandwiches. Meanwhile, I can make myself a sandwich at home or at a high end local bakery with wheat bread containing nuts, wheat berries, and whole wheat grains and, miracle of miracles, the bread actually brings something of value to the table. Delicious taste, fiber, and a feeling of energy and actual nutrition. For that reason, we have added whole wheat to our larder and have ordered a small hand crank grain mill.

reply to post by Rockpuck


Dude, you live in Oregon... You should be able to easily cram a good sized deep freeze with venison, elk, antelope, bear, lion, pheasant, turkey, goose, duck, salmon, and shelfish meat enough to last a family for a year.

I have actually set a goal for myself this year of reducing our store bought meat budget down to only whatever it costs to buy bacon, the occassional chicken, and maybe some pork loins. If I can fill my moose tags, a couple bear tags, and have a successfull dipnet season down on the Kenai, combined with one good sized halibut or a few medium sized fish plus a few solid waterfowl trips and some ptarmigans, I should be able to easily meet this goal. From just a rough calculation in the weekly budget, if I can fill up my big deep freeze and my upright freezer with meat, that will represent at least $7.5 grand a year in saved money vs buying everything at the store (or about $5 grand a year vs this past year when I did not stock much in the way of meats). Throw in my intent to can as many berries as the wife & kids can collect and look into drying mushrooms and my goal is to cut back to where we are only buying dairy products and veggies on a weekly basis. There really is no need to cut meat from your diet if you live where game is available.

reply to post by burdman30ott6


Haha, yeah most people I know do that.. never been one for hunting though. In April or may I'll be going Halibut fishing and hope to stock up. I believe Halibut is something like $14/lb too.

Originally posted by mikeybiznaz
reply to post by James1982

 

by golly you are right. coming over from another thread where OP discovered Quantum mechanics aplied to thought and how changing the past changes the future......Change not from anybodies pocket to mine....Lets mentaly change the heat back to heat, melt the frost and grow new crops......organic = grown with horse crap not nitrogen which is what horse crap is....yet you can eat nitrogen out of the bag...it will only burn but it isnt poison. Feed urea is 50% nitrogen they feed it to cattle where temps fet below freezing to keep the cattle warm.....think about that the next time you have to buy ORGANIC...........no pestisides different label all togeather

I'll have to be honest and say that went right over my head. I have no idea what's going on.

I didn't believe it, at first.

My mother told me she saw zucchini for $2.00 @ recently.

Zucchini! Costing more than a bottle of beer?! No way, I thought.


I mean, doesn't nearly every home gardener end up with more of that stuff than he/she can possibly Give Away?

I live in northern California, we grow almost everything here.

But I just came home from the supermarket where they were asking $1.25, a piece, for cucumbers!

DANG!!!

This is going to cause me to be forced to eat more meat! YES! Won’t it be wonderful to have a nice thick juicy steak with a side of pork chops and some fried chicken for color? I’ll jump on the global warming band wagon if it results in my eating more meat!
Thanks Al, any more info on this global warming will be greatly appreciated.

reply to post by James1982

You mean capturing wild yeast from the air? I made some home-brew with wild yeast I caught, didn't turn out to good lol. Can bread really be made with wild yeast? I guess I don't see why it couldn't, all you need is the Co2 from the yeast farts. I'm really curious how this would turn out, maybe it's time for an experiment.

WELL... you could always catch and maintain a ginger-beer plant

If it doesn't work you at least ca use it to make ginger beer.

Originally posted by Neopan100
reply to post by Slan1

 

I have read many survival blogs that suggest the supplies you mention...but my question is..

WHAT do you do with 25lbs of flour? I mean without yeast what exactly can you make?

There are lots of unlevened bread recipes out there or you could make german dough balls or pasta.

reply to post by burdman30ott6

...was shocked at how tasteless and crappy the bread tasted to me. I ended up picking at the cheese and meat on the sandwich and tossed the slices of bread in the trash. The caterer uses "Wonderbread" for their sandwiches....

My Doctor called white bread "eatable napkins"

I will not touch the stuff. Grains make me sick (reflux) so I am a green leafy & meat. I probably should look into growing sprouts.

I am thinking of setting up a trading scheme with a neighbor. I have goats and sheep they have an unused green house and a summer garden....

reply to post by burdman30ott6

Dude, you live in Oregon... You should be able to easily cram a good sized deep freeze with venison, elk...

I worked with a guy who had never bought meat in his entire life. He had three big freezers one reserved for hides he would tan. All his kids, male or female were the same.

I've been stocking up on chicken leg quarters, cheap cut of meat, but put that in a crockpot, came home made some dumplings with the stock it made (no yeast in that), and ate for two days. Put enough noodles in the second day when the dumplins cooked away, and had chicken and noodles, even better.

I bought the 20 cent seed pack at our local box store, some jiffy pot seed starters, not the tray sets, I have about 15 dollars of seeds and supplies, some flowers that are edible, great additions to salads. I prematurely started a set of seeds last week and everything has started! I have enough seeds to start two more sets to stagger my plantings.
I need to get some alfalfa seeds, can have instant green, in about 3-5 days, rinse daily, put about a table spoon in a sterilized mason jar with enough warm water to cover, put under kitchen sink in dark. Next day rinse and drain, I found old stockings cut to fit the top perfectly, you don't have to remove just drain and fill right through the mesh. Rinse and drain daily. Once sprouts are about 1-2 inches long can bring out to countertop or place in windowsill to green up. Great on sandwiches, makes a terrific substitute for lettuce, till I can plant out of doors.

Once weather gets better, my new hobby is to go catch catfish and bass in our local lake as long as the water eco system holds out, don't forget the fishing license, keep it legal.

just my 2sense..

I'm a restaurant manager and was on vacation when this thread was posted. I admit to not paying it a lot of attention. When if got back to work there was an email that indicate that we were goin to have to be extremely careful with food costs as produce prices were on the increase.

The email said that several items would be going up as much as $25 a case. Tomatoes, cucumbers, etc we've been getting for around $11 a case.

There goes this quarter's bonus check...

I haven't noticed any produce inflation here. Overall prices for groceries are the same in central Arizona.

Fry's Foods usually has the best prices in the Valley of the Sun:
www.frysfood.com...

reply to post by burdman30ott6


Kenai you say? Well hello neighbor I am so glad we live here where that kind of subsistence living is possible. Given the current circumstances of our economy I am very thankful for the resources we have here.