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I've been working on a new lower cost budget for when my husband changes jobs next year, and I was having trouble knowing when I would run out of things I needed to order online and order in large enough quantities to get free shipping when I could, so I could plan ahead. I finally got fed up and decided to order everything at once. :) I looked very carefully at the best buy dates on products so I could match my shopping to commercial distribution, and finally decided on buying every six months, in September and March. I went through my pantry and thought about staple supplies, and simplified my buying. So all of my oatmeal, pasta, sugar, salt, all the dry goods, I purchased this September, buying a six month supply. Almost all of the produce will come from the garden, so that just left the perishable things. I decided there were eight things I would need from the store, and they are meat, cheese, dog food, bouillon, bananas, avocados, citrus, and buttermilk. Things like coffee I buy instant and in bulk with the other dry goods. 

I've found it very freeing not to have to think about shopping anymore. Meals seem to come together more easily too. We use what we have, not necessarily what we want. I've been using the freezer more, I even bought some of those Souper Cubes, but I have the dry goods to make just about anything. The freezer I use for things I've already prepared, so I can have a quick meal on hand. It's not really for long-term ingredients. We use olive oil for a lot of our baking, and as long as the local farm keeps delivering our milk, I can always make butter. 

We have been in a heat wave they keep saying will end, but it never does. It's awful even trying to take a walk at night because the heat radiates off the street and pavement. It's miserable, and my garden has been miserable too. We've barely had any tomatoes yet, so I had to buy canned tomatoes in my dry goods storage. My onions rotted because it was so rainy and humid during the growing season that they never cured right. I've been using my trusty Welsh onions that are still going strong, and I ordered some dehydrated onion in our dry goods storage. I even lost my potato onion sets, and they aren't usually affected by anything! I am growing a denser, drier kind of onion next year. I've had to change a lot of varieties this year. 

Since my grand pantry plan relies on eating out of the garden, we've been hard-pressed in this heat to get our fall and over-wintered vegetables started. My fall lettuce is barely hanging on, though my fennel seedlings are doing well, but just today I lost two rutabaga seedlings to the heat. My spinach seed has only sprouted a few spinach plants, and my carrot seeds have flatly said Fuhgeddaboudit! I do have cauliflower and sprouting broccoli seedlings for over-wintering doing well. Our second corn crop is doing well, and we have two fat watermelons growing. The chard is doing well but our green beans died! The leeks just stand around looking sad, though the tepary beans are fine along with the sweet potatoes. We're going to get a bumper crop of winter squash. There's definitely food out there in the garden, but it's limited, and we're going to have to take what we can get. I have one rhubarb still standing. 

I awoke this morning from a dream about parsley worms. In my dream I thought about how beautiful the caterpillars and butterflies were, and when I awoke I was promising never to kill the parsley worms again. Later in the day, when I went out to water the garden, there were 16 parsley worms on my two small parsley plants, and I had my son kill them all. So much for the meaning of dreams. :) I let the parsley worms eat the volunteer dill, but the dill has died from the heat, and I need my parsley!