How to cut grocery costs while homesteading

We’re homesteaders, we’re not quite self sufficient. As homesteaders we have a relatively low grocery bill, here’s how we do it, 8 simple ways to cut grocery costs on the homestead.

Meal planning

When you go to the grocery store, you need to go in with a plan. Don’t go to stock your shelves with impulse purchases, you probably don’t actually need another box of pasta to collect dust, because you already have 7 at home that you forgot about. We meal plan for two weeks at a time (click here if you want to learn how to meal plan) This helps you stay on target and under budget at the grocery store. I’m always shocked at how little we actually need when I make our grocery list.

Buy ingredients, skip the processed food

Processed food is expensive, and ready made meals are normally packed full of preservatives and the portions are small. We’re ot perfect and we do buy some processed foods, after all we do have toddlers that survive on snacks. Making food from scratch helps a ton with our budget.

Buy pantry staples in bulk

We make all of our breads from scratch so we buy our flour and sugar in 50 pound bags from a store that sells ingredients in bulk. To store all of our ingredients we have food grade buckets that we got for free just by asking our local grocery store’s bakery if they had any. We have all purpose flour, bread flour, and sugar in these giant food grade buckets. I can’t imagine how much money we would spend if we just bought 5 pound bags of flour at the store.

Grow your own food

As homesteaders of course we grow our own food. We make sure to grow staples that we use weekly like tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and carrots. When I say we grow these things, I mean we grow a lot of them, we normally aim for at least 40 tomato plants for our family of 5.  Also, note that you don’t need 40 tomato plants, even if you don’t have a ton of land you can still grown your own food, make some raised beds in your backyard or check out your local community garden. Anyone can grow food.

Learn how to preserve your food

You need to learn how to preserve your food, believe it or not, we’re not eating 40 tomato plants worth of tomatoes in a span of a couple weeks. We typically turn most of our tomatoes into tomato sauce that we water bath can and store in our cellar. It’s February and we’re still using our homemade tomato sauce for soups, sauces, casseroles and more. Some things are great canned we both pressure can and water bath can, I definitely recommend picking up a Ball Book for safe recipes (and don’t trust what you read on the internet, there’s a lot of scary, unsafe advice out there.) Some things can be frozen (check out our freezer sweet corn recipe) some things can be dehydrated too. The best part about food preservation is anyone can learn how to do it, even if you live in a city you can totally learn how to can.

Literally hunt for food

We love filling our freezer with venison, we don’t really buy beef anymore and use venison for everything. We process the deer ourselves and package and freeze each cut, making it almost free. I don’t think we would have survived as a family of 5 on one income in this economy without having a freezer full of venison.

Raise your own food

This will be our 3rd year raising meat chickens, last year we bought a plucker (I recommend the Super Handy brand over the expensive Yardbird, I researched a ton before we invested the money and the Super Handy brand is cheaper and holds up longer!) and it was a game changer we were able to process so many chickens ourselves. We’re also raising our own pigs, but with the amount of land we have we realized that we would rather not raise pigs anymore, it would have been great if we could sell some of the babies, but the market for Kunekunes has definitely crashed. Once these pigs are grown and gone we’ll be done with pigs.

Get laying hens

Honestly, I don’t even think this is saving us money. We’ll never recoup the coop costs and feed is expensive, but it’s nice to have eggs all the time..except now, because it’s been cold and the chickens are refusing to lay. Not irritating at all.

Did I miss anything? Did I share a life changing tip? Let me know in the comments below!