Things are moving along smoothly as we make our transition from summer to autumn in New England. The nights and mornings are noticeably chillier; the sun is a bit weaker and sets earlier. I have started bringing my plants in as well as re-potted many indoor plants that had outgrown their homes over the summer.

We took a trip over to the community garden yesterday, picked up some late tomatoes, rainbow chard, tomatillos, sweet & hot peppers, grapes and our first luffa.

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This is luffa. I planted 3 vines in April. They are insanely aggressive plants. A couple weeks ago, Justin & I went to check on the plot and noticed that the luffa had grown so heavy that it had collapsed the structure we had the vines growing over. Justin found some scrap pieces of wood and metal in the shed and we hoisted the structure back upright, tying it down where we could. Note to self: shit gets real in September.

Luffa take something like 210 days to mature, so we’ve still got a little time before we can harvest the rest of them I counted about 6 total, but they’re hard to find in the tangle of leaves, vines and tendrils.  I’ll post an update as soon as we can skin one.

Onward to the continuing Grocery Project:

Shaw’s
4 small bags of “Bible Bread” on super markdown  $2.00
2 stacks unsalted rice cakes  $3,00
Spicy brown mustard (large container because we love brown mustard)  $2.49
4 cans of tuna  $4.00
15oz can chickpeas (quick hummus!)  $0.89
half & half (1pt)  $1.69
a whole pineapple  $2.99
3.5lb bananas  $1.39
1 head of iceburg lettuce  $0.99
sales tax $0.00
 Total  20.24

We bought some pickled garlic from Stop & Shop out of the olive case; it counts as prepared food and is taxed, so we will count that in our “out” food, since we ate about half of them in front of the store. We also tore into the Bible Bread outside of Shaws. Anyway, $81.68 + $3.31 = $84.99.  Divided by  6 (outings), comes to about $7 per person.. that sounds about right, too.

Groceries since Sept 1: $188.45 + $20.24 = $208,69; divided by 20 (days) = $10.43, and further divided by 2 (people) = $5.21 per person per day.