Monday 28 September 2015

Food budget

I have been looking at our record of spending over the last year to see how growing our own veg has helped out budget.  Leaving aside the costs of gardening in seeds and compost etc.

Up to 2013 with me still working full time and mostly cooking from scratch and having a small suburban veg patch our food bill was an average of £72 per week.
In 2014 with us both retired, and cooking from scratch before we had a veg garden our food bill was £63 per week.
In 2015 over the 3 months when 90% of our fruit and veg has come from the garden (including a poly tunnel)  the food bill average is £52 per week.  At present we have groceries delivered from Sainsbury;s but shop for meat and fish locally, going to those place once a fortnight and buying enough to last. This is probably not the cheapest options but it creates more time for gardening and cooking at home rather than being out shopping all the time!

Talking of budgets, our target of £30 of electricity for the month is getting closer, with a little pruning of this and that we are now on the 27th and are only 5% over budget!  What we can't work out is what we did at the beginning of September to cause the over spend. There may have been a couple of extra washes as we had visitors over the Bank Holiday and we had a couple of roast meals so that may have caused a rise. Will be watching the SMART meter all of October to see what our pattern of use is.

Will be looking at what we spent on gardening lat year and setting a budget for seed buying before those tempting catalogues arrive!

4 comments:

  1. 4 seed catalogues have already arrived here! Like Christmas stuff in the shops they get earlier every year. Well done on getting your food budget down. Do you keep an account of seed prices

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    1. This year we had a box of seeds left over (lots from a magazine I used to buy) and then brought some cheap brands at the garden centre. Results were so variable we are going to start from scratch and buy direct this year. Measured up the veg garden today and started a plan and budget.

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  2. I've only got a couple of things to buy in spring. Onions and potatoes. I got a lot of seed from Wilko for 10p at the beginning of August.

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