Buying in Bulk

Buying in bulk has been a major blessing to our family over the years. Our first experience with buying in bulk began with just white flour and sugar from Sam's (which at that time was over an hour away). I had zero clue how to cook or bake when I was a young, newly married woman at the ripe old age of 19. It took me a year to come to the realization that I actually wanted to cook and bake, and that I could really enjoy it. It took a couple more years and a couple of babies before I jumped into cooking and baking from scratch, but once I started doing that, I quickly learned it was in our best interest to buy dry goods in bulk. 

As our family grew and we evolved into a more healthier lifestyle of eating, it became more and more practical for us to seek out a bulk co-op company to purchase our dry goods from. Since we live in small-town rural Alabama, finding a co-op company was not that easy. Thankfully, through many hours of searching, as well as networking with other like-minded families, we did finally find a co-op company. That was about eleven years ago. Because of the cost, only once a month delivery options, and the inconvenience of driving an hour to reach the co-op drop-off location; we opt to purchase a one year supply of all our necessary dry good food items.

For our large family (currently 11 living at home) that means we store around 45, 5 gallon buckets (some are 6 gallon buckets) within our home. We do not have a large house. We actually live in a doublewide mobile home. Our house is not a Pinterest house. We make our house work for us. For now our buckets are dispersed in three different closets, stacked three buckets high. We keep smaller containers of everything in our kitchen pantry for daily use. We typically fill our smaller containers once a week depending on the food item, while some may only need to be filled monthly. 

We label the buckets with masking tape and a Sharpie. We do this because often the buckets have to be switched out when we purchase a surplus of one item or another, from year to year. It's super easy to just rip off the tape and put on a new piece, instead of scribbling on the buckets. 

I really don't have an exact science as to how I figure out how much of each item we need to purchase each year. It's kind of just a given that all our buckets need to be filled and I take stock of our inventory before placing our yearly bulk order. Some years we eat more of one certain food item than another and we order accordingly. 

Through trial and error I've learned how many pounds of food fill the buckets. Different food items require different amount of buckets. For instance a 50 pound bag of quick oats fills about two and a half 5 gallon buckets. But a 55 pound bag of seas salt barely fills one 5 gallon bucket. And to be honest I'm still learning! Even with this being our eleventh year for bulk ordering, we ended up being short four buckets, so we will have to order some more. This year we purchased more bulk beans than we have in the past, and I overlooked two full buckets of oats (meaning we didn't really need any ~ sigh, good thing they won't go bad!).

The following list is the bulk dried goods we've ordered over the years. As I've mentioned before, what we order exactly each year depends on what we consume, which fluctuates from year to year. 

Prairie Gold Hard White Wheat Berries

Quick Oats

Old Fashion Oats

Steel Cut Oats

Popcorn

Cornmeal

Brown Rice

Wheat Germ

Flax Seed/ Flax Meal

Spices

Carob Powder

Carob Chips

Raisins

Cranberries

Lentils

Sunflower Seeds

Quinoa

Kidney Beans

Chick Peas

Black Beans

Pintos

Sea Salt

Barley

Yeast

Nutritional Yeast

Baking Powder

We also purchase a year's supply of honey, usually as 'seconds' which means there's some form of condensation in the honey. To us this doesn't matter and allows us to buy the honey at a discounted price. Along with the honey, we buy a year's supply of maple syrup. We buy the maple syrup by the gallons, and four of them usually meets our family's needs for the year. 

The company we use for our dried goods bulk order is from Country Life Natural Foods. We usually place our order around March after we get our income tax returns. This year it took us until the end of April for us to get our order in due to most of our needed items being out of stock. Since we order so much food, we don't usually join in on a group co-op order, our own personal order meets the necessary money quota required for a truck order. 

We order our maple syrup from Branon Maple. 

The honey comes from a local farmer we know. 

We've purchased buckets from several different places over the years, one being Emergency Essentials, but they no longer sell buckets. We have purchased them from Lowe's before too and another online container store; but I honestly cannot remember the name of that company, it was so many years ago and the buckets are not labeled with the company's name. Pretty much any bucket will work as long as it is food grade.

Ordering in bulk has so many benefits, but mostly it helps save our family money and allows us more flexibility to remain committed to eating healthy. Finding some of these items in our local stores is nearly impossible. Without the bulk food suppliers our family would not be able to enjoy such diversity in our healthy eating endeavors. While we do eat plain, simple food, on repeat for the most part, it is a blessing to be able to mix our meals up to some degree. 

There really isn't anything complicated about ordering in bulk. It's just one of those things you have to jump into and learn as you go along. Each family is going to have their own different needs, but I'm confined nearly every family can be blessed by ordering in bulk.

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer

Winter Canning

Oops, I guess this post should have gone before yesterday's post, but that's what happens when your'e as behind as I am in sharing what's been going on around this little ol' homestead. We're just going to roll with it, and hopefully I'll get caught up sooner than later.

Since we've decided to go full on mega gardening season this year, we knew we had to free up some space in our deep freezers. We currently have two fridge/freezer combos and two upright deep freezers. We try to reserve freezer space for venison and produce that doesn't can very well. But, come August when we are all run ragged we often freeze the field peas and tomatoes instead of canning them. So, we often have a freezer full of those two items this time of year.

Now that we're hoping for a bountiful harvest this year, we are acutely aware that our freezer space is critical; so we commenced to have a couple winter canning days. First with our frozen tomatoes and second with our frozen field peas (Mississippi Pink Eye Purple Hull, to be exact). 

We don't do anything special to freeze our tomatoes or peas. Simply shell the peas and put them into freezer baggies, and then freeze. For the tomatoes: we quarter them, making sure all the bad spots are cut off and discarded, and then put them into freezer bags and into the freezer. If it's a cherry or grape tomato we put the entire tomatoes into the bag without cutting. 

To can the tomatoes and peas from frozen, we set them into large bowls to unthaw over night before we plan to can them. I especially like to use my frozen tomatoes to make rich, thick tomato sauce. The frozen tomatoes make a perfect sauce consistency for making pizza sauce, which is why I put these pureed tomatoes into pints. Typically, when I'm making pizza sauce a pint jar of tomato sauce is sufficient.

We had quite an abundance of peas stored in our freezers. I must admit I rarely pull peas from the freezer when I'm wanting to use them in a meal. It's just so much easier to use already canned peas when preparing a meal, because they're pretty much already cooked.

We ended up with 18 pints of tomato sauce and 29 quarts of field peas (one jar of peas is not pictured because we used it for dinner). Not bad for a winter canning session. We've been hugely intentional trying to eat what we have preserved, especially in regards to eating what is in our freezers. After all, we worked really hard to grow the food and to preserve it. Even with life being so uncertain these days, it's such a blessing that another season of gardening to grow our own food is upon is. Normalcy is definitely a positive ray of hope and for that I thank The Good Lord above. 

With Love &Hope,

Jennifer