Tips for cutting back on your food bill

There was an article in the paper this week about reducing your food bill. The reporter rehashed the typical little tips like making a list to go shopping, making soup with leftovers, and not going to the grocery store hungry. Nothing wrong with those tips but there has been times when I have taken slightly more drastic steps. Like the time I killed, cleaned, wrapped and froze a huge turtle. I then cooked turtle for Tuesday and ate leftover turtle for Thursday. I did this for 7 straight weeks. It really wasn’t that bad because the taste varied. The forelegs tasted like duck and the back strap tasted like shrimp.
Then there was the night we had a lantern and gig in the creek and collected suckers, bream, jack, turtle, and eel. Then a huge creek minnow went in a hole in the toe of my uncle’s boot. We kept and ate the minnow. (Flavored the stuffing with sourgrass I picked off the side of the road.) Growing up we occassionally gigged over 100 lbs of fish a night. We ate some fresh, put some in the freezer to eat whole and canned the rest to eat in patties over the winter. The reporter suggested going vegetarian for a meal. Growing up we never bought meat to eat during the week. Sunday dinner occasionally featured store bought chicken and pork chops. Some Sundays we had hamburger and the hamburger may have been in spaghetti sauce or on pasta. Sometimes we might eat meat we had caught or killed but some weeks we ate vegetarian every day but Sunday. I bet I have a slightly different perspective than that reporter in the paper. So for what it’s worth, here's a few tips if you really want to reduce your food bill.
1. Take up hunting. I have killed over 50 deer for my family. A couple of deer a year can go a long ways. Besides it is great recreation. And if you are able to process deer, people will occasionally give you road kill.
2. Don’t bypass the little varmints. The way city squirrels sit around they look mighty vulnerable to a sling shot. I have eaten raccoon and muskrats too.
3. Take up vegetable gardening. I ate peanuts for several years with no inputs other than time. Somebody gave me the original seed and I saved seed every year. Peanuts don’t need any nitrogen fertilizer. And there are dozens of other plants you can grow in your garden.
4. Add some edible plants to your landscape. In piedmont North Carolina think blueberries, muscadines and figs. Put the excess in a freezer.
5. Learn to eat wild plants. I hate to think of the winters I didn’t eat many vegetables while chickweed went to the bad in yards up and down the street. Of course I have taken advantage of many wild edibles. One year I would pick blackberries during my hour lunch break. I froze them and ate them all winter. Almost every year in Cabarrus County white acorns go to the bad. Shell them out and wash them in a couple of changes of water. Then toast them and grind them up. If you don’t care for the taste you can sweeten it with sugar. You don’t have to find left over country for edible plants. I have eaten daylilies collected in suburban areas.
6. Learn to fish. One year I caught a couple of hundred little bream and put them in the freezer. The following winter I told my friends I would provide and cook the fish if they would provide French fries, slaw and drinks. We did that every Tuesday night for over 10 weeks.
7. Pintos will make a meal. To change the taste you can add catsup, pickle relish, beet pickles, black pepper, or hot peppers. Milk and cornbread are nice compliments but there have been times when I had pintos for supper and pintos were what I had for supper.
8. If it comes right down to it, you can take flour and sugar, mix them together, and then mix in butter and maybe a touch of water to get it mixed in one big gooey gob. Then eat it. This will increase your risk of diabetes, stroke, heart attack, obesity and arthritis. If you keep doing it, additional problem will develop. (These statements weren’t approved by the FDA but you can take my word for it.) Still10 dollars will buy two weeks worth of calories which may be enough time to scrape together some more food money. And for that matter, a cream cheese Danish isn't much better nutritionally speaking.
9. If you get down to one food left on hand, you only have to figure for 2 meals a day. I don’t care if that one food is grits or potatoes or stewed tomatoes; you won’t be able to eat more than two meals a day. Even if you aren't getting enough calories you won't be able to eat that third meal(For the most part, people that know this have been there. This is the first time I have ever seen it in writing.)
10. If you are going to sell blood plasma, make sure you do it before you run completely out of food before going to the clinic. First of all you have to lie about whether you ate or not. If you don't lie, they won’t take your plasma. And there is a reason they ask. Lying there on the gurney with cold blood flowing back in around an empty stomach was a pretty tough point in my life.

Blackberry Planting Frenzy

I was talking with the county agent in Cleveland county (about 90 miles west of Cabarrus County) about a year ago and he said he suspected there would be 100 acres of blackberries planted in Cleveland County during 2007. This week I asked the actual count. It was 150 acres. He suspects there will be an additional 150 acres planted in 2008.
I don't forsee very much acreage being planted in Cabarrus County. If a person planted 10 acres, that person should be prepared to hire 70 workers during picking season.
At any given time the total number of people in Cabarrus County willing to work that hard and who don't have a job is probably less than 70. I moved to the Charlotte area during the recession in the early 80's. I remember a guy telling me in 1986 that anybody who really wanted to work during that depression never had to leave town. It has pretty much been that way ever since. There have been people working at jobs they didn't enjoy, or a jobs where they wished they were paid more, but anybody who wanted to work hasn't had to leave town. When cuts down on the number of people who would want to pick blackberries.
Twenty years ago there were people willing to pick blacberries and strawberries for the fun of picking them and the ability to save a little money. In 1986 there were 4 pick your own strawberry operations in Cabarrus County. Today there are none and while strawberries could be a profitable crop, you better plan on hiring somebody to pick them.

I was asked to talk to some Concord City planners about the downtown market. Here are the talking points.
We feel a downtown farmers market is an amenity that brings several advantages to the City. It brings people out on the street, it is a social equalizer, and it increases number of visitors to downtown.
Here is our current situation.
30 day lease with Wachovia is problematic. Farmers need to plan on a yearly basis.
Difficulty of Parking
Customer mix seems about 50% drive up/50% downtown workers. Drive up traffic could double with better access. Several customers who worked in the CTC building have been terminated in the change to Windstream and nobody knows if replacement workers will support the market at the same level.
Vehicle traffic crosses pedestrian traffic within farmers market. Not sure if this is suppressing customer counts but we suspect it might be a factor.
Lack of Shade
Difficult on produce
Reduces customer count on hotter days (around 90 degrees)
Difficult on farmers

The future of the Farmers Market is unpredictable.
Most likely scenario is that vendor and customer counts will stay steady given current conditions.
Vendor count could rise with better conditions.
The farmers market has discussed finding a better venue for Wednesday (Mt Pleasant, Odell or Midland) but currently the market doesn’t have volunteers willing to take on this task. If another location was found outside of Concord and all vendors given the option of moving, vendor count would probably be cut in half.
Piedmont Farmers Market is committed to building a local food system. Any help achieving this goal would be appreciated.

Horticulture Newsarticles Available

Between the holidays, I finished putting my 300 best news articles on line. http://www4.ncsu.edu/~djgofort/ I still need to index them better but you can access them. News articles are written for Cabarrus County which is near Charlotte North Carolina.
Also some of my TV shows are on line at http://www.co.cabarrus.nc.us/News/Channel22/programs.html

Potential Opportunity for somebody interested in farming

Yesterday I visited a farm where the development rights have been sold to Central Carolina Land Trust. There is a house on the property. The owners would be willing to rent the house ($500 monthly was mentioned) along with some farmland ($50 per acre annually was mentioned). They are not interested in selling. If somebody is renting anyway, this is a beautiful place just to live back off the road. Location is about 4 miles out of Mt Pleasant. The house was originally built around 1800 but has been expanded and maintained so that it looks very livable (from the outside anyway). There is a 7 acre field adjacent to the house along with two smaller garden plots although one garden plot won't be useable until some weed control takes place. There are a few mature pecan trees and mature blueberries with the potential to make a marketable crop. There are plums, pears, figs, apples and muscadines in various conditions. I wouldn't plan on selling anything from these last ones, but the potential for something worth eating is fairly high as well as the opportunity for saleable preserves and jellies on some items. Several people would share the deer hunting on the back side of the property (there seems to be at least 30 acres of woodlands) but I figure a person who lived there would be able to shoot some of their own food. Soil is probably a Badin. I know for certain it is a slate belt soil which won't be the best soil a person has ever seen but I know farmers living off that type of soil. Not a lot of potential for erosion in the 7 acres. (More nearby cropland is available for rent if a person needed it). Irrigation could come from a pond on the property or from the well which was originally rated at 35 gallons per minute. There is a beautiful white oak around 120 years old in the front yard and a cedar near the old spring in the back yard that I bet is 200 years old with character to match. There are some sheds so some storage space could be arranged plus I suspect there are some farm shop type items a person would find useful if they did much farming. Let me know if you know somebody that would fit this opportunity.

Solar Greenhouse Pixs

The most recent Successful Gardening article for the Cabarrus Neighbors (http://www.charlotte.com/) talks about solar greenhouses. Here is a picture of mine without the plastic covering. The green color in the bottle is algae evidently growing on left over corn syrup. Some people suggest adding dark food coloring to the water. This may improve heat collection but isn't critical.

Hot Links to Websites Referenced in Rotary Club Talk

United States Geological Survey
http://water.usgs.gov/
Blue Ridge Aquifer
http://capp.water.usgs.gov/gwa/ch_l/L-text4.html
Information from NC State
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/disaster/drought/
http://www.bae.ncsu.edu/programs/extension/wqg/publications.html
Other Links
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/consumer/hortinternet/water_quality.html