Large Family Costco HAUL | How do We Know How Much to Buy?

Hello everyone, my name is Chelsea, welcome to Little Mountain Ranch on a very foggy morning. It's very foggy outside. I love these foggy fall mornings. There's no fog here any other time of year besides fall, so I really try to take advantage of filming. the sunrises are absolutely spectacular and I post them on my Instagram account, which I will have linked in the show notes for you, today we are heading to Costco to do a bulk grocery run. We will be gathering our grain for the winter, we try to supply all of our bulk items, as well as our animal feed, every six months or so.

I'll make those UPS stocks at online grocery stores through Horizon distributors or through organics, which we'll link to in the description box below or we'll go to Costco if we have another reason to head north, which We do today because we are also going to get our grain and I thought it might be interesting for you to come. along with us and see the kind of things we buy here on our bulk farm because we grow a lot of our own food here but of course not all of it so let's get going everyone is loaded we wake up bright and early this morning and now it's 7 a.m. m. and we'll actually get out the door on time, which is a real miracle since we get our grain, so we like to buy our grain directly from farmers if we can do it. first for me, do you think we'll use it because you can put them next to each other so we can get more if you really want?, uh, that would be nice.

I'll show you when we get out, but we have a flatbed trailer and Normally it only fits four bags and that's it, but this guy thinks it can fit a couple extra bags, which would be great because that means we have to make a trip here. in spring more than we would. We have to do it if only four beds fit, so we'll see what they decide. They already have all the grain loaded, so we're going to go grab lunch and then head to Costco overseas. came out of Costco alive with almost everything we needed we couldn't get the flower most of the oatmeal there was something else we couldn't get they weren't in stock daddy's dad snuck in some things yeah Dan snuck in some candy oh okay in the popcorn mix you snuck in he was sneaking stuff in from behind now it definitely wasn't it was definitely Dan anyway oh Ginger that's right they didn't have Ginger anyway um so we did it was around 1900 or so and we've already spent 1200 at the other place where we buy in bulk and then we have another probably eight hundred dollars worth of stuff to buy and that will last us for six months for everything except vegetables and 12 months.

Many of those things make me feel great, one of the reasons I shop like this is not only because it is less expensive for a

family

our size to buy in bulk, but also because I don't like buying groceries, so I would rather have We have to do it a couple of times a year and then do it every week, so of course we will still have to go to the supermarket weekly to buy the vegetables we need. We are not growing at this time of year and until spring when we start to have vegetables. We have a goal to finish the grow room in our basement where I start all my seeds and be able to grow microgreens, it's okay this way, yeah, um.

I had to grow microgreens so that at least we would have our vegetables also on our own property or also on the farm during the winter, but we are not in that place yet, so we will still go to the supermarket. But oh no, I led you the wrong way. Very sorry. Now we're going to have to make a U-turn with this huge trailer with all this Grain on the back or we might have to go up that road. We, I don't

know

, I'm sorry, honey, this is the second time I've done this and it's a little crowded, there's a lot more people in this town than in our little town, when we get home, obviously it's going to be like that.

I'm going to be late, so I'll film the rest of this video and show you everything we accomplished in the morning. Good morning, now we are back home. We have our trailer. We have to unload all the grain and unload all the groceries. We brought everyone. the food from the freezer and I will put it in the freezer, but now we have to do the housework and then we will go to the house and I will show you all the food that we have and the purpose of doing this is because I hope it can be useful because I

know

what to buy wholesale and trying to figure out how

much

you really need over a certain period of time, whatever your time period may be, can be really overwhelming and a bit daunting, as it certainly was when I started, which is the purpose behind sharing this information with you and I will also share with you how we discovered what we really needed, suddenly it's about to go up the mountain, there you come in, little miss you bring. her cup with her up to the cow we put a little bit of cinnamon and a little bit of maple syrup in the bottom of the cup and then I milk her right into her and she gets a nice hot drink in the morning so if every time I go I'm coming down, if he has already done his homework, then he comes running with me.

My poor cow has a cut on one of her teeth, so I'll show you that in a second, so we'll use some Salve to help. to cure it, but it makes milking a little complicated because of course it hurts, but you need to milk all that milk otherwise you might get an infection, so I have to be very kind, Mr. Elvis Dumbledore, when I say Elvis, all of them, always. thinks I'm saying Elvis but his name is actually Elvis Dumbledore his nose on the stairs and then his note then his nose actually pointed at his plate oh yeah that's right he's always waiting for his milk in the morning.

I thanked you. Happens. Miss, come on, good girl, and go on, good girl, okay, so I'm not sure if you'll be able to see this because it's pretty dark in here. She's got a cut up there on her teeth, so let's put some on her. Put some ointment on it and wash it well, oh sorry darling, that must hurt the poor thing, so cows will get their teeth cut like this going through the woods and climbing a bramble or something, it doesn't happen that often. and they usually heal pretty quickly, but it still hurts, it doesn't get any cooler than this, boo, no, it's not good, yeah, okay, we're back at the house and we have all the food ready, like this I'm going to explain to you what we bought and why we chose to buy some of the things we bought.

The question I get asked a lot is how do you know how

much

food your

family

really needs over a given period of time and everyone is different for us, we like to have a solid six month and 12 month supply of a lot of different things so We don't have a super technical system to solve this, but it really works well for us, we do it about three weeks. More or less eating plan and that includes breakfast, lunch and dinner. Dan and I sit down together and do that and then from that we create a shopping list for that three week period, exactly how much of each thing we're going to need to be able to make all those meals, this is a really easy thing to do. us right now just because we know exactly what men ask for or the recipes simply from having made them for so long, so once we're done and we've created our shopping list for that three week period, we can then multiply it by the time What we want to buy at that moment.

We take that list into the master list that we have of all those ingredients in our pantry. our Root Cellar and our freezers and we will go through it thoroughly and mark the amount of each thing we need. That phase of creating the master list of ingredients that we really need to buy at the store doesn't take us much time. At this point, just because we've been doing this for a long time, but what can be time-consuming is taking that list, going online and doing some shopping between the different places we shop and trying to find the best prices.

We shop at Costco Wholesale Club Horizon Distributors and sometimes organics, so we have to go to each of those places, look up the price of each item for each of those different places and then choose the least expensive place and that is what we will go to. physically and shop in the store or we'll order those things online, we'll actually take our shopping list when we do this and we'll write down the prices of each thing on that list and where we'll get each of those items and then over the next week we'll do all that shopping, so now that we've done the wholesale club, now we've done Costco and now we're going to do our online order for our flower I think that's the last thing on our list that we had to do when it comes to this type of purchases.

It really is quite a steep learning curve at first. I found it quite overwhelming, but once you do it for a couple. As the years go by, it begins to become second nature. There are probably many more efficient ways to do this, but this is the way that works for us and our family, so let's start showing you what we really have here. We didn't buy a ton of bread products, but the kids asked us to buy some of this Demsters Raisin Bread because they really like it, so we bought three of these. They already ate two of these breads for breakfast this morning.

We bought six packages of tortillas. So this will last us six months. There are 36 wrappers per package so we will only use one of these per month and the tortillas are super easy to make but they are easier to buy so I buy a couple of packages of naan bread from them. Every time I make butter curry or something, I make my own naan, but the kids also like pizzas for lunch, so we have a couple of these, which are just kind of treats, and then some loaves of bread for those times when I don't want to make bread or I'm sick or something, we use two loaves of bread for each meal, so as you can see, this is not a ton of bread for us, so this is just our backup and then behind that we have four quick out boxes, we usually buy ours in big bags, but they were a good deal so we bought them to go to the pantry.

These Ziploc bags weren't actually on our list, but they were a really good price, so we bought two of those. We're not big cookie eaters in our house, but we love these sweet potato cookies. They are actually very tasty, so we bought six boxes of those. These salad dressings. These three bags are a treat for me. Actually, no one else likes it. but I love them so when I need to make myself a quick salad for lunch I can add a handful of these and get a little extra nutrition. Some cashews, these weren't on the list either, but we had some others. nuts on the list and they were a good price and everyone loves cashews we put them in a nut mix so we got two bags of those two bags of sliced ​​almonds.

Almonds are very expensive right now, so whenever we see a decent deal on them, we buy them. Boxes of granola bars should be thrown in the snack bag of our car so we have some snacks if we take extra time in town for someone's lessons or something and people just need a little extra fuel, that's what what these are for three bags of chocolate chips and these are for baking thanks cocoa powder four bags of those six bags of blueberries these weren't on the list either but they are delicious so we got two of these one some extra shampoo to stock up on our shampoo and conditioner some scrubs 12 jugs of maple syrup and we were going to buy the giant big 20 liter jug ​​of tomatoes or not tomato syrup maple syrup but they didn't have them in stock so we ended up having to buy the smallest three jars of vanilla and I looked at the price comparison between buying the vanilla beans they had for sale there and making my own vanilla versus buying this and it was actually cheaper to buy the vanilla already prepared so I did that.

I don't remember buying this, so this must have been something Dan threw in the cart with a little more apple cider vinegar. My kids love bagels and they love all bagels so when I saw this dip I checked the ingredients and they were decent so I thought I would buy that for dip. Our Bagels needed a little extra cinnamon, so we got some cinnamon. These tortilla chips are for nachos. We actually used two of these huge bags of tortilla chips for nachos, so we didn't actually buy or store them. We buy them with our weekly shopping. grocery store, but they had a good price on these, so we bought four bags of those, picked them up as a little gift for the trip and to be completely honest, Dan and I weren't too crazy about them, the kids thought they They were fantastic, but we didn't think they were very good foreigners and alsoWe get the dried mango as a snack on the way home for the kids to have fun with.

These two bags are here for movie night and this is your absolute favorite store bought junk. food, so we got two bags of those, obviously they won't last us long, but that's just a gift. 12 of these three kilogram honey jars and the reason we did this is because, as I mentioned in my last video, our bees were stolen. by wasps a couple of months ago a little over a month ago, so I didn't want to take any more honey from them because I want to leave them there, honey, so they can get through the winter, so we have some of our own honey. but we also buy honey, we usually buy Adam's peanut butter which is our favorite all natural peanut butter but they actually haven't had any where we normally buy it for over a month so we ended up choosing this brand.

This brand is fine. not bad so we bought 18 jars of peanut butter and one of my favorite things to buy at Costco is their frozen fruit because they have organic frozen fruit at a reasonable price while buying it at our local supermarket is very expensive so we bought strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, some cherries and then also some greens, so my corn crop, growing corn here is really a challenge and this was the first year that I was able to successfully grow enough corn to keep it, but I was only able to do it. I think it was seven quarters, so we bought it. some frozen corn and a couple bags of frozen mixed vegetables.

What I was looking for was frozen peas, but they didn't have store-bought frozen products. Actually, it's especially if it's organic, it's pretty good quality because it's picked at its peak. right and then it flash freezes right away, so that's usually pretty good four and a half kilograms of organic cane sugar and I think that covers everything we have, we still have nine of our 11 children living at home, our two oldest of those who are. who still live at home are adults now and are busy and going on with their own lives and don't really eat much at home, so we feed seven kids and two adults full time, one of the questions I usually get.

Every time I talk about food storage or pantries or something like that, that's why we choose to shop this way and the reason is mainly for convenience and then of course for economic reasons it's less expensive for our family to buy in bulk the way we do it. If we went to the supermarket every week, we would still do it. I should say that we still go to the supermarket quite frequently, but it's usually just to buy green vegetables in the winter, greens and things like that, and our goal this winter is actually to reduce our trips to the supermarket even more drastically, that's the first thing , there is the economic factor and the convenience factor, and the other thing is that there is a sense of food security for us.

A couple of different things have happened. over the years with job loss or illness or a washed out road not being able to get into town for some reason and then one of the last reasons and this is more relevant to where we are now in the world is that inflation is rising so it's less expensive for us to spend this money every once in a while, it could even be in a month, so that's something we have, it's not the main reason we buy this way. way this time, because I always do it, but it's definitely something we're thinking about.

I'm going to do my full Pantry tour next week. I just have to load all this stuff into the pantry and then I need to finish up my preserves for the year. which I'm going to do mostly today and tomorrow once they're done the video will be up so I'll be posting right now on Monday, Wednesday and Friday so that'll be one of those three days so keep your Keep an eye out for that, if you haven't had a chance to subscribe to our channel yet, consider hitting the Subscribe button and the bell notification. We would love to have you here as part of the Little Mountain Ranch family.

I hope to see you in the next video everyone bye