In today’s edition of “What did Penny buy”….
Today I went to the open air market. I was nearly out of produce and wanted to restock, and I am trying to keep down my costs. I’m still essentially doing a pantry challenge, but not the standard one- my goal simply is to use up as much of the dry goods in my pantry as possible, focus on using them up before they get buggy, but I still need to be buying produce because I don’t have that already in my pantry.
I was trying to see how low I could actually get today’s shop to be- I drew 60 dollars and said I’d try to keep my shop under that… and it certainly was! I spent $33.08 on my entire shop!
What I got was 72.3 lbs of produce, so that averaged to 46 cents per pound on my produce. Not bad at all, considering people have been discussing lately on local frugal forums how all produce locally is extremely overpriced, and also considering the fact that the two stalls I frequent at the market for the most reduced rack type stuff were actually closed by the time I got there…
Well, I looked around and tried to scout out the best prices for the things I need- but you’ll notice no tomatoes or cucumbers since I couldn’t find any of those for a low price, and I figured that I got enough other produce that we can manage without tomatoes or cucumbers.
In the first stall I stopped at, I bought 8.72 lbs of bananas when I saw they were selling them for 38 cents a pound- all other stalls seemed to be selling them for 52 cents a pound and up. I paid $3.29 for the lot, and they were not past prime.
I then saw some persimmons that were past prime being sold also for 38 cents a pound, so I bought 3.89 lbs for $1.51.
I looked and looked for some other stalls with very low prices but couldn’t find any, so I made my way to a stall that had ok prices, not amazing ones, even for their past prime stuff, so I bought 5.5 lbs sweet potato, 7.26 lbs zucchini, 9.46 lbs carrots, 11.66 lbs potatoes, 3.74 lbs beets, and 4.4 lbs onions- a total of 42.02 lbs, for $23.71, averaging at 56 cents per pound.
Of course, just my luck, after I paid that, I found a stall selling zucchini for 26 cents a pound… so I bought 17.6 lbs for $4.57. Yes that means I bought nearly 25 lbs of zucchini, but they are my favorite vegetable and I can’t get tired of eating them, so the more the merrier…
And that was the entirety of my grocery shop today.
Though in the spirit of honesty, yesterday I was passing a store that I rarely manage to get to- the place where they sell raw honey cheaply, and I bought 6.6 lbs of raw honey for $27.43- $4.16 per lb… so so far my grocery total for this week has been $60.51, and it probably will get higher though, because I may run out of animal proteins soon…. But still, I’m happy with what I managed so far.
Have you gotten any good deals lately while grocery shopping? What deals have you snagged?
Are you a fan of zucchini or no?
