Saving Money on Organic Food (Deals, Discounts, and Delivery)

I recently ran across an article on the Internet entitled, How to Eat Organic on a Budget. Since this is the tag line for my Homemade Life workshop, I clicked on over. This article listed 75 ways to save money while eating organically, most of which I already do and a few that caused me to chuckle (get a couple of chickens and hatch your own eggs - really that's all there is to it? and skip the Starbucks -duh). It also listed sites where you could find discount coupons and deals on organic products. I was excited – this is useful information! So I spent the better part of an afternoon exploring these sites. And I learned two things –

If you spend two hours tracking down a coupon for 50 cents off a product, you probably haven’t really saved anything.

Most sites that make big promises are either for products you’ve never heard of and have no need for, or are full of dated information and expired coupons, but plenty of advertising.

And here’s the thing about coupons – they’re only useful if you were planning to buy that product anyway. Otherwise they’ve done exactly what the company had hoped when they hired that fancy advertising genius – they’ve tricked you in to buying their product.

A few of the sites did actually garner real coupons on products you might actually find in your grocery store. Now, I make no promises that your grocery store accepts these coupons. The world of coupons is lost on me mostly because coupons are for processed food – organic or otherwise, and I avoid processed food – organic or otherwise- as a rule of thumb.

All of that said, I will share with you the sites that looked promising because I know I’m an oddity and most people have no choice but to buy processed food (or starve) so I’d rather you bought organic processed food if you must buy processed food at all.

Camp Achterberg

July seems like the longest month of the year to me. I don’t know if it’s the long wait for ripe tomatoes, or the endless days of children brimming with energy and attitudes. Either way the month surely drags.

When they were small I stockpiled all the camps for July. A few hours of peace were worth the price tag, besides Vacation Bible Schools run back to back and cost nothing. But then the protests began. No one wanted to go to bible school. No one wanted to get out of bed for camp. It’s too hot. None of my friends are going. Blah, blah, blah. And the costs of camps for bigger kids seems to escalate with every year and every sport.

To avoid their rebellion, I rebelled. No more camps. Alright just one each. This summer we’re down to the free Harry Potter camp at the library and a Medieval Times camp through the school system. My checkbook is happy, but I’m back to the endless days of nothing to do but ferry the children to the pool or friends’ houses. Frankly, I’m bored.



"Swimming in the driveway"

 So it’s time for “CAMP ACHTERBERG”. Camp Achterberg was born one summer a few years ago when there was too much time and no money for camp. So I made our own camp. Five days of homemade fun! When I first announced it, you could hear the groans for miles around. But ask them about it now and they love to tell stories of Camp Achterberg. “Remember when that lady came and yelled at us for swimming in her driveway!” This was the stream hike that went a little too far and ended with threats from a distant neighbor when the kids were jumping off her driveway bridge in to the creek that ran underneath. She was pretty worked up and it certainly didn’t help that the kids thought she was kidding when she yelled, “No swimming in my driveway!”
Camp Achterberg is one week of planned events led by none other than mom. Here is a list of ideas we’ve used and/or considered:

- stream hike - you don’t need a stream running down your street like we have, you can head over to a park or just pull over along the side of the road. Be sure to wear old shoes, sunscreen, and bug spray.

- Visit a farm – there are loads of farms out there that give tours, check them out online or ask a farmer at your farmer’s market if their game.

- Visit an obscure museum. Most of us never visit the museums in our town unless we have company visiting, and then we just hit the big ones. There’s a National Clock and Watch museum nearby that gets rave reviews, look in your phone book or online and find a museum noone knows about – they’re usually free or even cheap.

- Make a big, messy art project. Go to your local arts & crafts store and buy something you’ve always wanted to do – tie dye is fun. Last year we painted tiles left from a rehab project as stepping stones for the garden (and grave markers when the fish we won at the carnival died).

- Go to the movies

- Have storytime – no matter the age, kids still love to be read to. Fix a snack, get comfy and read.

- Taste test all the ice cream stands in your town (get a pint to go from each and dig in blind folded!)

- Go bowling or ice skating

- Invite friends over

- Take a hike

- Go canoeing or kayaking

- Sleep in a tent in the yard

- Have a bonfire and make s’mores (or use your grill if it’s too hot)

- Swap bedrooms

- Go berry picking

- Take a factory tour (we loved the candy factory tour!)

- Make a water slide in your yard

- Put on a talent show (pets are also invited to perform)

- Visit a kennel with new puppies

- Volunteer at a food bank

- Take a bike ride somewhere other than your own street

- Build a bug or rock collection

- Go to the pool from the minute it opens until the minute it closes

- Go geocaching or letterboxing

- Have a picnic

We brainstorm ideas and nothing is off the table. Sometimes a camp day is simply each kid inviting three friends to come play which makes it feel like camp. Or it’s a trip to the dollar store with all the money you can earn in one morning (great trick for getting your house picked up). It’s doing anything you wouldn’t do on a normal day. It makes every day a special occasion. For us, going out to eat is rare, so a camp day might include a meal out somewhere new.

Hairnets required for factory tours!

If you haven’t got a whole week to dedicate to camp, try one day a week. “Camp Tuesday” works just fine. Some of these activities might cost a little money, but compared to the camp fees, they are a real bargain. Start your own camp this summer. I promise you’ll make memories that last a lifetime and you’ll never realize how much fun you can have in your own hometown.

Worms From Heaven

It wasn’t manna from heaven, it was worms from the garden gods. All week I have been contemplating purchasing a few wiggly helpers for my compost. When I finally pulled out a catalog, I was shocked to discover the prices. Our compost isn’t composting fast enough and I’ve decided that what it needs is more worms. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that worms are not cheap! In fact 500 worms (the smallest increment available) would set me back $39.95 (plus shipping). This completely goes against everything I believe about gardening, which is that it shouldn’t cost much. Growing vegetables is supposed to save you money, ditto for compost. I pushed the idea aside for more desperate times and moved on to other projects.

One of those projects was moving the hay delivered during the blizzard from where it’s been sitting under a tarp on the driveway (the only place accessible for the hay guy at the time) to the barn where it belonged. I was tired of lugging the 50 lb bales of hay up the hill to the barn every day. The big storm we had over the weekend had pulled the plastic tarp off the hay so now the bales weighed much more than 50 pounds, soaked as they were. Lucky for us the storm also washed away nearly all of our mammoth snow fall. So my husband and I loaded all the hay in to our little pick up and after several trips had the hay neatly piled in the barn. The miracle occurred when we picked up the pallets that were underneath the hay pile. Below the pallets, squirming all over our driveway were hundreds of worms! Free! All we had to do was scoop them up, which we did, loading them in to the back of a plastic dump truck that was handily abandoned in the driveway by one of the kids.

We laughed at our luck. There was only one moment when I was kind of grossed out at the idea of touching all these worms. That happened when I was holding the worms for the picture my husband took and I felt several worms “worming” their way between my fingers to dangle below my hand. Ehhh! I deposited the worms in the compost bin and could almost hear them shriek with happiness. They had spent the previous month under a pallet on our cold cement driveway and now they had been dropped right in to a larger than life smorgasborg. They must have felt like the messiah had come and carried them right to the Promised Land. Another win-win in the natural world.

If you compost you need worms. I don’t think you need to store a half ton of hay on your driveway to attract them. I bet you could leave a piece of plywood on your driveway through a rainstorm or two and you’d find plenty. Worm catching would be a great “chore” for your kids too – I’m sure they can find a few hiding under rocks or under the leaf layer in the woods. (Just be sure they aren’t harvesting worms from your garden!) When you consider that worms cost about eight cents each in a catalog, I think you’d be getting a bargain if you offered five cents – and the shipping would be free!

I’ve been shaking my head and smiling to myself ever since we received our worms from heaven. It’s very easy to spend your fortune on garden gadgets. In fact, that’s kind of second nature to us Americans. We always want the latest, greatest, quickest fix. My husband works for a tool company so he’s all about having the “right tool for the job”. And having the right tool for the job does make it easier. But all those tools, gadgets, boxes of worms, etc., add up in terms of the money you spend, the piles of stuff you accumulate, and the disappointment you feel in your soul. Why do we always need more/new/better stuff?

I learned that lesson all over again this weekend with the worms from heaven. Look around, open your eyes. Maybe what you need is already all around you. It may require a little work and resourcefulness, but it will feel much better on your wallet and your heart to use what you have – or what your neighbor has. We’re headed to a neighbors later this month to borrow his splitter for the trees the storm pulled down. And we’ve already begun trying to figure out which neighbor is most likely to have a pressure washer we can borrow. The father of one of my daughter’s friends called us up yesterday and asked if we wanted the cherry wood from a tree he had cut up for a job he’d just finished. (He’s a hardworking landscaper/do-any-job-outside guy if anyone wants a referral) We heat with wood, so the load of wood he dumped on the driveway (where the worms appeared!) will heat our house for a week next year.

Another great way to keep costs down when it comes to gardening is to swap seeds. Most seed packets hold way more seeds than an individual gardener needs. Nobody needs 25 zucchini plants. Order with a friend and share the seeds. Some gardening clubs organize seed swaps, but you could also organize your own. Our local library is having a plant swap this May. I’m already growing all kinds of extras to take and swap.

Gardening, and living organically for that matter, shouldn’t be expensive. It certainly doesn’t have to be. Look around you. Talk to friends, neighbors, and farmers in person and online. Offer to share your resources, labor, knowledge and you’ll be surprised how much stuff you can get for free!