March is coming, its not that long before I will starting my fourth year of March Pantry challenge..  I have a number of new readers over the past year, so I thought I would give a head up in case any of you would like to take the challenge for the weekend, for a week or two or get really brave and aim for the whole month?

Basic Rules are as follows, eat out of your farm, home and or Pantry only!

• Pets and Critters are exempt
• Pick a month and go from the 1st to the 31st

Our extra rules

• Can still shop stores for loss leaders or sales for our food pantry but it can not be used during the month of the challange.
• If DH is traveling out of town for work, those days are exempt from the challange for him.

Dh agreed to the challange but threw out one of his own.. he says he is happy to give a hand and follow along but that I need to make it seems like there is no challange going on when it comes to meal time..and that in and of itself is going make this just a touch more tricky..

So the month we picked was March for a couple reason

Its a long month with a full 31 days in it.

• Everything outside is still frozen solid-putting me at a disadvantage
• we are well into winter and there are a number of things that are getting low in storage as we have already been eating out of our home grown pantry for five months now.
• No Shopping extras, still can only have my regular max of 60 dollars on the coming shopping for the last two weeks of Feb, plus my regular 40 for stocking if sales are there

These factors should give the challange a bit more Oomph!

“Just to add a little more work and to keep myself on the level -I will do a daily meal planner and to make it interesting to the readers, I will do my best to post lots of recipes and photos to go along with.”

I did this on my first year of 2011, and it was a lot of work but those are posts that are very interesting to read and I think it really helps folks see what can be in a pantry and how its used.. so I am going to work hard to do the same this year.

Its worth noting that DH works off the farm full time, and that I am home full-time working on the farm, there are times where we both take time off the farm related to our work jobs (but never at the same time).

So I was talking to my momma about this upcoming challange and she was all on board, turns out her farm womens group had this same challange in March of 83, and she did it herself, she said the only thing she ran out of was brown sugar and libbies baked beans, an that us kids eat her out of all her canned fruit.

One of the ladies of the group was named Agnes and she gave up in the middle of the challange, and went to the store for coffee an a few other things and Voilet (who was in her 80′s at the time) said to her,  “Honestly Agnes, some years we did not go to the stores at all if we were expecting.. we only sent our husbands once a year for coffee, tea, baking powder, Baking soda and salt in 50 or 100 pds bags”

Love hearing about how things were..