Could you feed 4 for $400 a month?

[CherryTreez]

No. I have a child with food intolerance. He cannot eat lots of food. I guess we could with eggs (I have chickens. So eggs are free. Well kinda. I pay for their food and gets lots of eggs in return.), Rice, chickens and frozen veggies. It would be boring and bland.

[Fullxbusymom]

Yes, I could. I have fed a family of 6 on that amt.

[Anonymous 7]

Are frozen veggies much cheaper than fresh where you live? I don't think they are here.

No. I have a child with food intolerance. He cannot eat lots of food. I guess we could with eggs (I have chickens. So eggs are free. Well kinda. I pay for their food and gets lots of eggs in return.), Rice, chickens and frozen veggies. It would be boring and bland.

[Momto2boys973]

I guess it depends on where you live. I could easily do it, as most of our meals are vegetarian and I mostly cook from scratch.

[lauren08]

Nope. We have 6 in our family, and we probably spend more than that in a week. The groceries are also getting more expensive around here now, ever since the pandemic.

[Emandab]

I typically spend 500 for two adults and two preteens but yeah the last 3 months I've spent nearly double. Need to cut some corners myself.

[Anonymous 8]

No my family is gluten free and I have a teenage son. Im thankful for my chickens, quail, and garden to help with the food bill. We also have some fruit trees.

[CherryTreez]

Are frozen veggies much cheaper than fresh where you live? I don't think they are here.

No. I have a child with food intolerance. He cannot eat lots of food. I guess we could with eggs (I have chickens. So eggs are free. Well kinda. I pay for their food and gets lots of eggs in return.), Rice, chickens and frozen veggies. It would be boring and bland.

Much cheaper. Bag of frozen broccoli is a dollar. Fresh would be 1.99 a pound. Corn, peas, green beans are all cheaper frozen. I want to plant corn, but that involves building another garden box.

[Deleted User 1511]

What does forage and glean mean?

I live in Appalachia and belong to a foraging group. We forage the "wild" for things like ramps, fiddlehead ferns, mushrooms, nuts, etc.

Gleaning means picking or clearing a field after it has been harvested. I glean with a group that helps supply our local food pantry but we take home a lot too. Larger scale farmers pick, usually by machinery, what is most convenient so we go in and pick those fruits and veggies that have been missed.

Thanks for answering. How often do you have to do that? What is a hoop house?

My foraging group mainly goes out a couple of times in the Spring (fiddlehead and ramps) and then a couple of times during the summer (mushrooms). Our gleaning group goes out a lot in the late summer, early fall (we picked up 1300 pounds of pumpkins in one day last fall) but we went to a local u-pick-it orchard recently and got cherries that were inaccessible by customers. Our gleaning group mainly supplies our local food pantry but we do take home some for ourselves. I do both because it's a fun group of people, not so much to fill up our pantry.

A hoop house is like a green house but much cheaper. It's design is usually a half-circle "tunnel" covered with double ply plastic. It extends the growing season a couple of months. I sometimes call my hoop house "my greenhouse" but it's not. I'm trying to manifest a greenhouse.

[Anonymous 1]

Prices went up for a while here, but they're starting to come back down. People also seemed to be stockpiling the less expensive foods, especially meats, for a while. So I wound up buying the already more expensive options, at further inflated prices.

Nope. We have 6 in our family, and we probably spend more than that in a week. The groceries are also getting more expensive around here now, ever since the pandemic.