Our lenten homesteader experiment...

One of the very few holdovers I have from my Catholic upbringing is observing the practice of giving something up for lent.  I always thought stuff like giving up chocolate or not eating meat on Friday were kind of lame, but some years I would do stuff like save all my change and send it to a charity or one year I tutored some friends for free (it was college, they were musicians and needed to pass a math class--'nuff said).  This year I decided to choose my lenten challenge for myself based on our homesteading lifestyle.  I decided to give up shopping and eating out from Ash Wednesday until Easter.

Over the past year that we have lived at our homestead (I can't believe it will be a year Feb. 28th!), I've been slowly building a stockpile of groceries in the basement.  I read several takes on the stockpiling idea and decided the best approach would just be to stockpile things that we use on a regular basis.  In other words, if I would usually buy three jars of pasta sauce every two weeks, buy six every two weeks until you have enough for a length of time.  It might sound like we ended up spending twice as much on our grocery bill as we normally would, but with all that we harvested from the garden last year, the deer meat we got this fall, the rabbit meat, eggs and chicken meat we get from the animals we raised, it wasn't too much more of a cost.  I think we are finally to the point where we can comfortably go for six weeks or more without going shopping.  

We did have to make an exception for two things.  We don't have a source of milk on our homestead yet, so we will have to buy milk and since this is not growing season, we will need to buy certain fresh produce items in order to cook.  I thought about buying some of the fresh produce and freezing it, such as celery, but we ran out of room in the deep freezer (maybe a sign that we need a second deep freezer).

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday and Easter is April 12th.  With the exception of milk and fruit and veggies...and gas for the cars...we are not going to purchase anything until then.  

There are already two things that I forgot about.  I forgot that the Easter bunny will need to purchase a few things for the easter baskets.  I also forgot about my son's birthday on April 10th.  Maybe I'll just make everything I need for those two holidays.  I think I have a few things for my son in the closet anyway and I made sure to stockpile cake mixes.  I mean, if something tragic happened and we HAD to live on our stockpile of food, I would be a much more pleasant person if I had chocolate cake occasionally. :)