A while back I had an idea.  What if I could skip the grocery store?  With prices soaring and time a precious thing, I set out to do just that.

 After discussing this with a friend, I learned there was a local place to get whole wheat berries that you could grind yourself and make flour.  It is far better for your health, super easy and the taste doesn’t even compare. Even store bought flour is still not healthy. They remove all that is good about wheat, the germ and the bran, to make it shelf stable. You see fresh ground would go bad if you let it sit in your pantry for months. This local place also taught classes and had recipes for fresh ground bread.  I jumped in with 2 feet and my family wouldn’t have it any other way! Now I have been making bread for over 10 years with only about 20 minutes every week or so!

Bread check!

Next, we picked up the cutest little chicks. Backyard chickens are fun and inexpensive and did you know in Georgia the state constitution protects your right to have chickens for eggs! Little know facts, you don’t need a rooster to get eggs and chickens lay an egg a day! How about fresh eggs for breakfast every day without every going to the store!

Eggs check!

The next challenge was our favorite veggie!  We love green beans in our family.  One of the easiest plants to grow is a bean.  At the seed store, we found a few varieties and grew them.  We ultimately decided on Kentucky blue lake bush beans.  We like the flavor and we learned that most bush beans are stringless.  This works well with our family as stringing them is annoying.  The first variety of pole bean, we didn’t get the strings out and Blech!  The worst!  Bush beans are super easy to grow, like the cooler spring and fall and grow very prolifically.  For $3 you can have so many beans you get tired of picking them.  We go out every day to pick and got about 1 gallon per day.  You can eat them fresh off the plant or cook them up or can them for later! When canning, they can be raw packed which means you rinse them, snap them in half, stick them in a clean jar with a smidge of salt, pour some boiling water over them and put them in a pressure canner.  This year I am proud to announce, we made it through the whole winter without buying green beans!

Veggies check!

We have recently gotten in to milk. We are now milking 6 goats and getting several quarts per day. So far we have replaced bread, green beans, and milk!

You can do it too!  Ask me how!