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What are unique ways you save money on food? Every time I think we can’t cut costs, I learn something new from someone or God gives me an idea.
For example, buying the same meat in a different store saved me 40%. We will save SO much money on groceries just with that one tip.
I’d love to hear your tips. 🙂
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I don’t think anything I do is unique but other than growing your food go to a u-pick farm and pick by the bushel and can vegetables and fruits. Learn to bake, make jellies, jams, pickles, sauerkraut, pasta, noodles, dehydrate fruits, vegetables and herbs, make jerky, smoke fish, make laundry soap- the list is endless. Also buy meat from a farmer or hunt and fish.
Read the weekly ads, think outside the box, don’t go to the store hungry, Use coupons when you can. In my area they are pretty scarce for anything I would buy. Shop more in the outer areas of the store first. They usually put the processed foods in the middle and check the upper and lower shelves as they put what they want you to buy at eye level. Check the discontinued area for bargains. I found led bulbs that way very cheap.
Do you live in an area where you can pick wild foods- berries, apples or grapes for instance? Do you have neighbors that have fruit tress and don’t use all the fruit or nuts? Do you or a neighbor have a cow or chickens? Some places people cannot sell raw milk except for animals but I would drink it if I knew the person. Is there a thrift bakery nearby? There used to be one near here and you could get a bagful of bread and pastries and some was good for people but sold for animals or chickens.
Just a few ideas off the top of my head and you probably already heard them or do them. I would like to hear what others have to say.
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Can trade labor for food almost every small farmer will accept this. Can be work on farm, or items they want, or skills they don’t have or are not good at. This includes things like child care and tutoring.
Go direct to smaller food manufacturers with buying club, you can get same discount as stores do when buying larger amounts.
You can ask certain farmers that are your friends if you can add animal to herd or flock paying for their food and such and a small fee for them to do work of feeding, much cheaper than store bought meat.
Plus most of the farmers I know can help you cut and wrap or process the meat.
Alot of farmers have wrecked stuff expecially older ones entering retirement, ask around and buy equipment you can fix and resell or trade with minimal work. We picked up 4 broken cow hay feeders cut into parts made 2 nice used ones and rest went into scrap. Paid 200 for the junk ones took 2 days of cutting and welding, some old paint and sold the two for 800 each. New ones that are not as strong sell for 1200 at local store the heavy ones are 2200 and you need to drive 6 hours round trip.
You can ask to glean fields after harvest, free food you just need to pick it and pay for your gas to get there
If you have a local smaller slaughter house you can ask for the offal, hearts kidneys lungs sometimes tails and tonguess. Cook into or grind into pet food, this can be sold as well.
We use the leaf lard from our pigs to make suet which sells well in farmers markets.
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We save by having a garden. We can all our veggies. We also watch the weekly sales for meat. When it is cheap, I buy in bulk to can. Also we hit roadside stands and farmers markets for any good deals. Right now we have about a year’s worth of food stored that we rotate and eat. We also got a great deal on long term freeze dried and dehydrated foods from a company that was going out of business. So we really scored there. That food we don’t use as it is a backup in case we have a bad year for gardening. That has happened a couple of times do to the amount of rain we got. More than usual rain than our garden could take. So lost on 2 years before. No one around here has fruit nor nut trees of any kind. I am thinking about a couple of apple trees and not sure what else yet. Need to be careful where I plant them as we don’t want them to shade the garden. Might have to plant in front yard. That would be questionable as people might take what they want. We had a pecan tree in backyard year’s ago and neighbors behind us while we were at work, stripped the tree dry of nuts. We drove up and caught them. The lady bragged how she got 13 grocery bags of nuts. We went off on her as we had none for that year because of her. She bought us back one bag and said we didn’t need these. How thoughtful of her to give us one bag back of our pecans. Thank goodness they have since moved away. Bad neighbors in more ways than one. We also had a neighbor that said her mother came home from work and someone stripped her garden of the butterbeans. She had a fenced in yard. So problems do arise as to what you can plant and do in a neighborhood. I want to find out where we can glean food at some farms. Farms are getting scarce around here as they are selling off the farm land. Sad situation. Our biggest problem is fruit. It is expensive around here for the most part. We are growing blueberries so far though, but the birds seem to beat us to them. Need to figure out a netting for them.
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@namelus I’d LOVE to support a local farmer by buying meat, but the last chickens we purchased from a farmer (over $100 worth) made us sick, and we tossed them all.
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