A little under a year ago, I wrote that sticker shock at the grocery till was putting more emphasis on garden produce. From firsthand experience, I talked about dusting off my preserving skills. We in the Stockford house made gallons upon gallons of salsa, juice, cider, jelly and a variety of soups, all carefully canned for the pantry or vacuum sealed for the freezer. We also put up more raw produce last year than any other in my memory.
The surge of homemaking didn’t stem from real financial need, although it was hard not to notice the tally at the bottom of the grocery receipt creeping up every week. It was driven more by awareness about the value of produce right there in the garden.
Suddenly, it seemed like a criminal waste to walk past a row of beans, which in a normal year might have been abandoned as too much work after the third or fourth picking, while knowing how much a handful of those beans would cost at the store.
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In some other year, you might have added items to the shopping cart without a second thought. Last year, the numbers on the price tag stuck in the mind.
Flash forward 11 months, and little has changed.
The latest monthly analysis from Statistics Canada clocked an 8.5 per cent rise in grocery prices in July compared to the same month a year earlier. That’s lower than June’s 9.1 per cent, but still a sharp jump from what people paid at the beginning of last year. Those numbers, in turn, are much higher than they were before the pandemic.
By July 2022, Canadians were already feeling the sting. That month’s grocery inflation — 8.5 per cent lower than July 2023, remember — was still a 9.9 per cent step above store-bought food prices during the same month in 2021.
By August last year, grocery inflation had risen into the double digits, a level it didn’t dip under again until March of this year.
It’s worth keeping those late-2022 anxieties in mind, because Statistics Canada will use those elevated price levels in future monthly inflation updates.
The concern is perhaps not as frenzied as last year and other parts of the consumer price index have eased. In June 2022, general inflation had reached 8.1 per cent. In July 2023, it was a much milder 3.3 per cent.
But that, again, is still higher than at any point in the five years leading up to 2020, when year-over-year inflation rates largely stayed under 2.5 per cent, with the exception of a three per cent peak in July 2018.
Inflation and cost of living remain top-bill topics. People are still looking to save money.
And, once again, the garden is brimming.
I’m not going to lie. Last fall was a lot of work — far more work than I expected or wanted to take on. I have never had so much respect for previous generations as I did standing next to the stove at midnight with my feet hurting, waiting to see if the latest batch of salsa was going to seal properly.
But even as the next round of harvest craziness looms, it feels worth it.
The hours spent in the kitchen last year did, in fact, have a tangible effect on my grocery bill.
More than that, some things just taste different when they’re homemade. The pasta sauce off the farm didn’t even taste like the same substance as the stuff off the shelf, and having a consistent source meant it became a staple rather than a one-off treat.
Then there was the convenience. Every frozen recipe of soup became a ready-made, hearty and healthy dinner just waiting to be warmed up. When daylight was at a premium in the winter, it opened up hours that would have otherwise been spent cooking.
That convenience, indirectly, became another cost saver. The temptation to just order pizza was a lot less when there was a better option waiting in the wings.
So, all said, will I do it all again this year? Maybe not to the same extent, but yes.
Lessons were learned in 2022. Some recipes were duds, but I’ve been adding to my list of new ones to try, and I’ll be allocating more effort to last year’s favourites. I also know more about what I used up and what lingered, unused, months later.
I am still swimming in juice, but I’m almost out of salsa. My last jar is sitting in the fridge right now.
The timing is pretty much perfect, though. Last time I walked down to the garden, the tomatoes were starting to turn.
