May found us finishing up our summer garden planting. I used to try to plant everything all in one big plant-a-thon day right after our last frost date. That worked just fine when I grew a small garden with a few plants. However, that doesn’t work as well when you try to grow as much food as you can! This year I’ve been learning to embrace the blessing of our long growing season and spent nearly a month transplanting and direct sowing. Less rush, more joy. Progress was still made. I’m curious to see if it balances the food preservation pressure come summer as well. Find the May 2021 on the homestead financial breakdown below.
Chickens
The initial spring overflow of eggs has slowed down to a more manageable daily quantity. Plenty to eat ourselves and enough to sell a dozen or two each week. Works out that we break about even financially. We like when they can pull their own weight!
Farm fresh eggs around here go from $3-7 per dozen depending on raising practices. We’re fairly middle of the road, so we price ours right in the middle.
Egg Totals
- Brown Eggs: 43
- Green Eggs: 53
- Blue Eggs: 41
- Total Eggs: 137
- Total value: $57
- ($5/dozen)
Chicken Expenses
- Bedding: $7
- Feed: $20
- Total: $27
- Net: $30
Homestead Kitchen
Well, we opened our very last jar of canned tomato sauce…now to see if we can make it to June’s first harvest or if we have to break down and buy some from the grocery store. Only time will tell! In addition to another round of our clean-out-the-freezer veggie soup, we also started eating more fresh greens from the garden and enjoyed hashes and frittatas with chard and kale…and we’ve been trying to find as many recipes as we can to keep popping open all those cans of salsa verde in the pantry. 30 pints was way overkill last year for this family of just 2 mouths! Ha!
- Total grocery savings: $64.98
Flowers
The first half of the month we were between bloom cycles in our garden. The azaleas, daffodils, and irises were complete. So the wait began for the zinnia, sunflowers, marigolds, and so much more! One thing that did bloom and add a small touch of color was our sage plant. The thin stems were a nice way to tie me over until the more flashy flowers arrived. Then the very last week of May things bloomed! Yarrow and Echinachea have been filling my vases at work and home. Also harvested a half pint’s worth of yarrow to make an infused oil for salve.
While I enjoy bouquets of flowers around the house, I don’t love spending money on something that is going to die and go into the compost pile in a week. Growing your own flowers is quite cheap (especially from seed!), so we are hoping to grow plenty of flowers to fill vases from spring to fall this year. Flowers around here run about a dollar per stem, so that’s how I’m calculating the cost savings for this category.
- Flowers by the stem: 27 x $1 = $27
Selling Extra
We often over grow more than we could possibly eat, so we often sell our extra produce through Growing Green Family Farms consignment-style. We also plant extra seeds every year to sell unique vegetable varieties to local gardeners. While April is the month we sell the most plant starts, it does trickle into May. Selling some of our excess brings a little extra $ into the household budget to restock the pantry with items we can’t or don’t grow ourselves (like chocolate, coffee, spices, etc.) and to pay for our seeds and seed starting soil.
- Total extra transplants and herbs – $42
Wrap up
Hope you enjoyed a look at May 2021 on the homestead to give you some inspiration to grow your own food, flowers, and share the bounty with your neighbors.
- Chicken Net: $30
- Grocery Savings: $64.98
- Flower Savings: $27
- Selling Extra: $42
- May Totals: $163.98