That Time We Didn’t Grocery Shop for a Month {guest post}

One of my few paying gigs as a writer is the marketing I do for Red Dust Ranch. Each week my family participates in their CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and receives a paper grocery sack full of fresh vegetables. Lately, that sack hasn’t been able to contain all the squash and watermelon that the farm’s abundance is blessing us with. It’s been a banner farm year, for sure, and when we were hanging out with our Red Dust friends and making barbecue pizza with their pasture-raised pork, I got to hear Sandi and Tim’s story. She tells it best, and I hope it inspires your family to appreciate the food that’s on your table.

BBQ chicken, potato salad, slaw, squash and zucchini, green beans, pickles. Nearly every thing on this plate came from our CSA one week this summer.

My husband, Tim, and I had tried gardening ourselves for two years. The first year was great. We had a robust garden with lots of veggies that we begged people to take it off of our hands. The second year was awful. We made our plot bigger, we added variety, and we did everything we did the year before. Our garden got flooded out and next thing we knew we had a forest and no veggies.

This year, we decided to try a CSA per the suggestion of my husband’s wonderful coworkers. They led us to Red Dust Ranch and it was the best decision we ever made. Not only do we get veggies weekly for a great price, but we have made some great new friends and are stocking up on frozen veggies for winter. Oh yeah…we didn’t go grocery shopping for a month and a half.

I know what you’re thinking…what about bread, milk, and eggs? It sounds daunting, but in reality it was actually really liberating. Every week we went to get our veggies and we got creative. We had meat in the fridge from Sam’s Club and enough other things to keep us from starving. When we ran out of something, we wrote it on a list and we improvised.

Every morning, I like to eat a cup of Greek yogurt. Well, I eventually ran out and was left with the decision to go to the store or find something else. I found something else. We had a lot of oatmeal and grits that had not been eaten and I am not above a simple toast breakfast. Until we went to the store upon returning from vacation, we ate what was in the house.

The week before our vacation was the hardest. We had run out of just about everything. We had no milk, no eggs, no yogurt, no orange juice, etc. The fridge was bare and our grocery list was massive to say the least. But why should we go to the store if we are days away from leaving the state? So, most breakfasts became the raisin bread that was lost in the back of the freezer, lunches were leftovers of dinner, which usually consisted of rice, a veggie, and a meat. Sometimes there was sauce, sometimes there wasn’t.

But we made it to vacation and then went shopping when we got back. We got enough to be able to go another month or more. This time we MIGHT go back for milk.

What this experience did for us?

I tell others that joining this CSA has been better than couponing from a money saving stand point. I used to clip coupons and desperately hunt through various websites looking for the best deals. It was incredibly time consuming, it was stressful, and honestly it was a giant pain.

So not only are we eating better, we are eating smarter in every way.

Thank you Red Dust Ranch!

Tim and Sandi Suda live in Demorest, Georgia with their two dogs Mattie and Courtney. The two met at Piedmont College over seven years ago and were married on December 31, 2010. Neither grew up in the north Georgia area, so it’s a wonder how a military brat and Atlanta native found each other and settled in a city with a population less than 2,000. Tim is a Technology Specialist for the Banks County School System and Sandi is a Communications Specialist for the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.