Being Thrifty - Or Doomerish - With Seeds: Creating Your Own Seed Vault

During last week's big snow, I began a worthy but somewhat tedious chore. The seed orders for the year had all come in. Not only do I succumb every year to the lure of buying too many varieties of seed, but even the smallest packets provide too much seed for me to grow in a given year. I've always been lackadaisical about storing my seeds. And that has always given me the excuse to buy more seed - so that it's fresh and viable - the following year.

I decided this year would be different. I went through all the seed - both newly arrived and saved from previous years - and separated out the portions of seed that would be planted this year. Some was discarded. The rest of what was still viable would be saved for future gardens. This was somewhat tricky, because I plan to succession plant this year. So I'll need some beet, carrot, spinach, brassica (cabbage family), and lettuce seeds for early season planting, and some for late season planting as well. Because I removed seed from the original packaging I had to make properly labeled seed envelopes for each portion. And to make it even more involved, there are enough seeds in some packets that I could set seeds aside for next year, and still have plenty for years beyond 2011. I wanted those two groups separated into different containers. Oh, and some packets of seed I had agreed to split with other gardeners. A whole lot of repackaging and relabeling, in other words.


I used the cool seed envelope method that El wrote about last year. Hers is vastly superior to the envelope I'd been using previously. So check that out if you're interested. Once the seeds were all divided up into the appropriately labeled envelopes, and the envelopes assembled into groups by anticipated usage date, I typed up a list of all the seeds in each group and printed copies of them so I'd have a record of each group for my garden notebook. I had planned to vacuum seal the seeds in plastic bags, and then put them in canning jars. But I found that even using a wide mouth, half-gallon jar wouldn't give me enough maneuvering room with the larger packs of seeds. So I settled for just putting all the seed envelopes into jars with desiccant packs saved from bottles of vitamin pills, along with seed lists for each jar. I arranged the lists such that they were legible through the sides of the jars. The jars were then vacuum sealed. Finally, I wrote a reminder warning to myself on the canning jar lid and secured it tightly with a canning jar ring.


These jars are headed for my chest freezer. The warning is to remind me not to open the jars or the seed packages until they have warmed up to the ambient temperature of the room. Why? Because if I open up frozen packages of seeds in a warm room, moisture will condense on the seeds and hasten their deterioration. Twenty-four hours at room temperature will prevent this. Now I just need to excavate a spot in the freezer where the jars will remain safe from knocks from heavy frozen items.


Most garden seeds will keep well enough in cool, dark, and dry conditions for 2-3 years. A few will be viable only for one year in such conditions (onions, parsnips), while others may last as much as 5-10 (cucumber, tomato). But we have hot, humid summers where I live. There is no spot I can just leave the seeds and count on favorable conditions for preservation. The method I've just outlined provides nearly ideal conditions for seed storage. I expect to be able to use even the parsnip and onion seed purchased this year well into the future. By separating seed to be used next year from the remaining seed, I will avoid the need to bring all the stored seeds back into bright, warm, moist conditions until I'm ready to divide my remaining seed stores.

So: my own frozen seed bank from the work of a few afternoons. You might do something like what I've done because you're dedicated to saving money, or because you're serious about saving heirloom seeds, or seed you've produced yourself. You might (justly) fear that Monsanto is hellbent on converting the entire global food supply into genetically modified crops on which they own the patents. Or you could do it because you believe the collapse is nigh and that seeds are going to be worth more than their weight in gold.

If you don't have a vacuum sealer, ask around. You might be able to borrow one just for this project if you know someone who has one. Or you could work with ziploc bags and just seal the mason jars tightly with lids and rings. Of course, if you have any serious doomer creds, you know the deep freeze will only last as long as the electricity does. But dry, and dark, and in a vacuum is still a much better storage plan for seeds than a cardboard box sitting in the dining room.

So Now You've Got a Chest Freezer

Two days ago we discussed how to evaluate the cost of a potential chest freezer purchase. Yesterday we talked about how you might or might not make that purchase a frugal one. Today we're going to assume you've run right out and bought yourself a new chest freezer. So now what? Well, as a frugal person, you naturally want to get the most out of this expensive appliance. Here's how to do it.

Maximizing efficiency

Reducing the costs to run the freezer. There are a few things you can do to slightly lower your electricity costs to run your freezer. Regular maintenance tasks such as defrosting and cleaning the coils are the chores that no one wants to do, but which really do make a difference in efficiency. Most chest freezers are not frostless. This means the food inside will keep longer because the unit does not cycle, but instead maintains a steady temperature. But it also means you'll need to unload the freezer and defrost it about once every year or two. Doing so allows the unit to cool more efficiently and lowers your electricity costs.

Be sure to follow the manufacturer's instructions on where to situate your chest freezer. My model needs there to be good airflow around it, and there are guidelines for the range of temperatures the room should be at for many models. The company that made your freezer probably did fairly extensive research on the optimal conditions for operating your new investment. So take advantage of their findings.

The other thing that helps a little is to keep the freezer full. You don't have to use this as an excuse to load it up with "bargain" foods that aren't really bargains. Ice will fill space in your chest freezer just as well as anything else. You could stockpile ice cubes for your next party, or fill old milk jugs or soda bottles and freeze those solid. You can easily add or remove sealed jugs or bottles as needed to fill up or make room in your freezer. Just remember to leave a little headspace inside the bottle for the water to expand when frozen. Bottom line is: if you have trouble keeping your freezer full of stuff that's truly useful to you, you probably bought a model that's bigger than you needed in the first place.


Organizing your Chest Freezer.

You can't benefit from, or eat, what you can't find. As an owner of a chest freezer, I can attest that organization becomes a very real issue as the freezer gets full. The new chest freezer owner invariably succumbs to the allure of all that empty space waiting be filled, and commences stocking up with abandon. Unless you get a model with some serious built-in compartments, keeping a chest freezer organized is more of a challenge than it might seem.

I tried the milk crate system and rejected it. For one thing it left too much difficult to use space outside of the crates. And for another, the cold temperatures left the crates more vulnerable to cracking. We tried keeping a written inventory of stuff going into and coming out of the chest freezer. This might work for some families or individuals, but we're just not that meticulous.

Eventually I hit on the idea of using the heavy woven plastic bags that are sold as reusable shopping bags. It's easy to fill these by theme: pork, lamb, garden vegetables, fruit, fish, dairy, etc. Generally, the tops of the bags stay somewhat open when mostly full of stuff, making it easy to see some of the contents. That way I know generally where to find things, and the handles provide a good way of pulling things out of the freezer without throwing out my back. I can grab the handles and pull out one bag at a time without having to bend and lift. Then I rummage through the bag with the freezer closed, and return that bag to the freezer when I've found what I wanted. I use easily identifiable, miscellaneous stuff to fill the gaps around these shopping bags. I have found that the regular thin plastic shopping bags aren't very good in a chest freezer; at such a cold temperature they tear quite easily on several kinds of packaging.

How you go about filling your chest freezer will depend on both your tastes and your personality. But eventually it comes down to balancing the desire to use space efficiently with practicality. In my experience, the most important habit to get into with a chest freezer is to label everything you put in there. I mean everything. You will probably do as I did and tell yourself a few times that you'll recognize this extra pie crust/turkey giblets/baking experiment when you next see it. Trust me: you want to label that stuff. Anything that doesn't already have a clear explanation - write the name and date on it. If you buy labeled fresh meat with the intention of sticking it in the freezer, you may want to put the date you froze it on the label anyway, especially if you sometimes buy meats close to their "sell by" dates. That information gives you some sense of how quickly you need to use up the meat once it's thawed. Because if you're looking at a roast that's been in your freezer for a while and is now three months past its sell by date, how long is it safe to keep it in the fridge before you cook it? Label everything. In the end it'll save you mystification, frustration, and money.


Portioning what you freeze

Thoughtful portioning is especially important with a chest freezer because a chest freezer usually runs at a lower temperature than the freezer attached to your refrigerator. So it's going to take longer to thaw a given item from the chest freezer.

I want to store foods in ways that make them easy for me to use quickly once I decide to take them out of the freezer. So I use a variety of storage methods. Soups and stews can go into plastic quart-sized yogurt containers. This leaves some difficult to use space around the containers, but it's a good portion size for a family of two. I typically make soups I intend to freeze a little on the thick side, then thin them after thawing. That way I can get 5-6 servings per quart.

I use the ice cube tray trick for things like citrus juice, pizza sauce, beaten eggs, and sometimes for pesto. Again, this is not the most efficient use of space in the freezer. But it allows me to thaw just as much of these items as I need very quickly. I've learned to portion meats the along similar principles. When I buy large quantities of bacon, I lay out a long sheet of plastic wrap, and then lay out the bacon in groups of two, three, or four slices, with a fold of the plastic sheet sandwiched in between each group. That allows me to reach in and remove only as much bacon as I want, without having to thaw the entire package at once.

Last year, the couple at Future House Farm showed off their beautiful array of produce stored in the freezer using the clever file method for ziploc bags. This consists of putting a liquid or semi-liquid food into ziploc bags, squeezing out all the air pockets, and then freezing the bags solid in a very flat shape. Once frozen, the bags can be stood up on edge and packed together like file folders. This works best when you either plan to thaw the entire contents at once (soup), or when the food will be frozen in a thin enough layer that you can just break off the amount you need whenever you need it (tomato paste).


Meal Planning & Freezer Inventory

Having a chest freezer full of food is a good feeling. But remember that you actively need to use this stuff up rather than just let it sit there as a hoard. It's a good idea to inventory what you've got at least a few times per year. If you have a lot of one particular item or items, make a note of the quantity on hand. Then keep that note in the kitchen to remind yourself to find a way to incorporate that item into your cooking at least once per week. If you've gone to the trouble of preparing ready to eat meals, keep a list of those as well. You're more likely to turn to them on the spur of the moment on a night you don't feel like cooking if you can simply look at your list and decide what to thaw. Isn't that better than just calling for pizza delivery?

Try to get into the habit of thinking about the evening meal early in the day, perhaps before you leave for work, or even the night before you cook. If you need to thaw something large from your chest freezer for use in the next 24 hours, place it in the topmost part of your refrigerator as early as possible. If your habits and lifestyle aren't going to include this much anticipation, then consider devoting one weekend per month to preparing meals that can go straight into the oven from the chest freezer. Search the web or your library for books on once a month cooking. You can find thin aluminum trays similar to pie plates in a range of sizes and shapes at most supermarkets. These are great for preparing small versions of casseroles and other dishes. And if you're careful with them, they can be washed and reused many times before they wear out.


-Whew! That's three days of talking about chest freezers. You know, when I started crafting these posts about chest freezers, I never imagined there'd be so much to say about them. I sincerely hope I've covered enough of the issues to put the chest freezer theme to bed. Onwards.

How to Save, or Not, with a Chest Freezer

Yesterday I talked about how to come up with an exact figure for the monthly cost of owning and running a chest freezer. Today I want to discuss how to evaluate that number in terms of what it would mean in your life.

Ways of Saving Money with a Chest Freezer

In order for a chest freezer to become a tool to use in pursuit of frugality, it must allow you to actively save more money each month than it costs to keep the freezer running. How you might go about this depends very much on your lifestyle, and what lifestyle changes you would make if and when you get a chest freezer. Let's look at some of them.

Eat at home instead of eating out. This is the big and obvious one. For those of you with a full family life of kids, two careers, and an overloaded schedule, the temptation to just get the family fed with fast food can be overwhelming some nights. Paradoxically, you may be one of the best candidates for buying a chest freezer. The catch is that you do actually need to change your habits at least a little. If, by owning a chest freezer, you substitute a few meals at home each month for eating out, you're going to come out ahead. Even if you simply microwave a frozen dinner rather than eating in a sit-down restaurant, you're better off. Of course, frozen dinners for a single meal would probably fit in the freezer attached to your refrigerator. If you switch from occasional restaurant dining, delivery, or carry-out to storing and eating your own homemade freezer-to-oven ready meals, you'll come out farther ahead. And if you entirely break a regular habit of paying for meals out, you'll easily save hundreds of dollars per month.

Also paradoxically, if you already prepare all your meals from scratch without a chest freezer, you need to ask yourself if getting one is really going to let you save more than the cost of owning and running an extra freezer each month. If you're already following frugal ways, what's the advantage to you of making an expensive purchase like this one? Well, you could be a candidate though for...

Gardening extensively. It can't be denied that having storage space in the freezer allows the home gardener to put away an impressive quantity of very high-quality produce over the growing season. If you already garden, then you could use a chest freezer to leverage the effort of working a larger garden space. If you don't currently garden, you could begin doing so. But again, honesty is required here. Gardening is a fun hobby for some, utter drudgery to others, and a serious commitment of time and effort for anyone who does it. So is food preservation. You can't just pick a fresh vegetable and chuck it in the freezer. Some other work is going to be involved. Are you really up to (more) gardening? Could you tackle it as a family project if your kids are of age to help? Consider it carefully before using it to justify a major purchase. If you do pursue this, you also need to think about which plants suitable for your climate and growing conditions will be preserved in the freezer.

Raising animals for meat. This is probably beyond the interests of many people, but it's something to consider if you're serious about moving towards food independence. If you plan to keep rabbits, chickens or other animals for meat, a chest freezer is probably a very good idea. Even having laying hens will let you store some eggs in the freezer for the times of year they don't produce.

Reducing waste. Having plenty of extra freezer space is a great opportunity to prevent spoilage of food you've already paid for or grown. There are times when stuff sits around too long in the fridge. In many cases, there's a way to get it into the freezer for later use. Citrus fruits can be juiced and the zest peeled. Both of these can go into the freezer. Cheese can be grated and later used for pizza or casseroles. Vegetable trimmings can be stored up and saved for making stock. Leftovers can be shifted later in time just by freezing and thawing. Fruits can be peeled, cut up and frozen for later use in desserts or smoothies. Keeping spices and flours in the freezer also preserves them much longer than they would at room temperature. So you may get more use out of your investment in some costly ingredients.

Shopping the sales and buying in bulk. There's no denying that freezer capacity can change the way you shop. Some grocery stores sell their must-go meat in large quantities. If you have a chest freezer, you can take advantage of this. You could also consider buying half of a steer, hog, or lamb directly from a local farmer. Or, when your price comparison book tells you that you've found a great deal on anything you use on a regular basis, you can stock up like crazy. We've got about twelve pounds of organic butter and ten packs of Hebrew National hot dogs in our freezer right now, due to fantastic deals that we spotted several months ago. It's great to know you have the storage space to take advantage of such opportunities. The Frugal Girl has a nice piece on how to freeze large quantities of chicken when it goes on sale, so that it's easy to use later on.

Stocking up on other things. I also use our freezer to store up homemade bread and other baked goods. I can bake ten loaves of bread in one day and freeze them for later consumption. This allows me to save a little bit of money on fuel costs by running my oven less often, and by not heating up my house during the hot summer months. This results in a fairly small amount savings compared to not having the freezer at all. I would probably still bake my own bread without the chest freezer. But the savings, small and difficult to calculate though they be, are there nonetheless.

Driving Less = Lower Fuel Costs. Having a chest freezer and using it to stock up can mean fewer trips to the store, which can save you money on gasoline. This can be accomplished either by buying in bulk, or by using the freezer to store food you grow yourself. But again, you need to look at the particulars of your life. If you drive by the grocery store on the way to work everyday anyway, you probably won't drive less as a result of having a chest freezer.


Drawbacks, Concerns, and Risks

Increased work load. As with many ways of saving money, chest freezer frugality takes more effort as compared to the "convenience" of paying to have your food prepared for you. In order to save, you must do the food processing.

The fallacy of "saving." Remember that you aren't saving anything when you put food into the freezer. Whether you got a fantastic deal on a roast, or raised your own vegetables, you don't save any money by putting these things in a freezer. You only save when you pull that food out of the freezer and eat it in lieu of something else you might have eaten that would have cost you more money. If you buy and stock a chest freezer with the good intentions of eating at home, but then ignore that food and continue to eat out or bring prepared food into your home, you're just wasting money. Eventually, the food in the freezer will become a total loss. Don't fool yourself into stocking up more food than your family can eat before it gets freezer burned. The best sale prices don't mean much if you only prepare a few meals at home each month.

Extended power outage can lead to a big loss. The whole premise of using a chest freezer to save money rests on a steady supply of electricity. Losing power during a cold winter might not matter much if your chest freezer is located in an unheated space. As a rule of thumb, food in a chest freezer that loses power will be okay for up to 48 hours if the freezer remains closed. But if you experience frequent power outages during warm weather, consider this risk carefully. You could lose hundreds of dollars worth of food in one go.


Making the Decision

So, is a chest freezer for you? Think about the monthly figure you came up with based on yesterday's calculations. For us, that number is around $5.80. Let's look at it by crunching the numbers. We're a family of just two, which means we eat 180 meals per month (2 people x 3 meals per day x 30 days). On average, that means the chest freezer must be directly responsible for a savings of just over 3 cents per serving for every single meal we eat ($5.80/180 meals). Or we could say that we need to use it to save $1.45 per week in food costs ($5.80/4 weeks per month). This is just a break even point. To come out ahead, we need to do better than that.

How many meals do you prepare each month? And how many people do you feed in your family? The more home cooked food you serve each month, the better your potential savings. And by contrast, every meal you eat out or buy prepared food lowers the savings contribution of your chest freezer. Assess yourself and your lifestyle honestly. If two working adults eat out for lunch every weekday, that's 40 meals per month that aren't going to be affected by having a chest freezer. You can't use a freezer as a frugal tool if you don't eat at home.

Thinking about all the possible ways of saving money mentioned above. How many are going to apply to you? Does this look like a smart purchase to you? Can you realistically expect to save more than the monthly cost of ownership? If you are comfortable with the increased work load needed to save a lot more than that monthly figure, you're a good candidate. If you just don't cook that many meals at home, and you don't see that changing anytime soon, this purchase probably doesn't make much sense. The same is true if you already eat quite frugally without the benefit of a chest freezer.

Tomorrow I'll give some other tips for those of you who already own or are ready to buy a chest freezer.

The Chest Freezer: A Good Frugal Tool for You?

I love having a chest freezer. We've bought it less than two years ago and I already take it for granted. In addition to my meager forays into canning vegetables, I've been socking away garden produce in my chest freezer for the last few months. So even while I've been following the $50 per Month Grocery Challenge, we've actually been adding to our food stores.

A while back, My Money Blog posted about our exact situation: having an extra chest freezer in the garage. I wanted to add to that discussion. If frugality is your prime concern, there are many things to think about before making the decision to buy a chest freezer. Some factors are obvious. If you're in an efficiency apartment or a very small home, space considerations probably rule out a chest freezer. But for most of us, the question comes down to costs vs. savings.

Over the next few days, I'm going to walk through the issues around owning a chest freezer. Naturally, if you're in the market for a freezer you'd want to consider several options:

Sizing your freezer. Think carefully about how big a freezer you want. If your family is large, and you cook from scratch most of the time, it makes sense to get a large freezer. If it's just you and one other person, choose a smaller model. The potential monthly savings goes down with the number of people you need to feed. So your costs must also go down if you want to come out ahead. Though it's tempting to buy large, having a large stock of stored food that doesn't get eaten up doesn't save you anything at all. A small family can store a large supply of meat and vegetables in a small freezer. My husband and I bought half a hog and half a lamb one year, and though it took us a long while to eat through all that meat, the meat itself took up a surprisingly small amount of space. As a rule of thumb, chances are good that you could get by with less freezer than you think.

Of course, if you fill your freezer with a lot of prepared meals and frozen dinners, you're allocating a significant amount of dead space to packaging. So consider how densely stored your food is going to be. Volume per volume, pre-packaged food will give you fewer servings than unprocessed meats, fruits, and vegetables. If you make your own prepared foods to freeze (such as quiche, casseroles, etc.), you're unlikely to use up extra space around them for packaging.

Energy efficiency. There are many stand alone freezers out there. Chest freezers are usually recommended over uprights because they are more efficient. This is due to a law of physics: cold air is heavier than warm air. Open an upright freezer and all the cold air falls out at your feet. Open a chest freezer, and the cold air more or less stays put where it is. If you're paying for your electricity, or if you only generate your own in small quantities, it'll probably pay for you to get a well insulated chest freezer, if you're going to buy any freezer at all. On top of that, it would be wise to choose a model that does better than the average in terms of electricity usage. The EnergyStar website has a good tool for evaluating all EnergyStar rated freezers. It would be a good place to begin looking for an individual model.

Shopping around for the best price. If you're reading this post, you have access to the internet, which gives you a wealth of opportunities to compare prices for durable consumer goods. Once you've narrowed down your choice of freezer models, shop around for the best price. Be sure to include any differences in sales tax and shipping or delivery costs. Then spend a little extra time speaking directly with any local vendors of this freezer who might not have an online presence. If you find a competitive price locally, be sure to ask if they could offer you a discount for paying cash. 'Cause you're not putting this on the credit card, right?


In order to make a smart decision about a potential purchase, we need to get down to brass tacks. In other words, we need to know what it will cost us. So the first task is to come up with an actual monthly cost of ownership.

Cost of buying the freezer itself. This is going to make a difference not only in the amount of money you have to lay out up front (because of course there's absolutely no question of putting this purchase on a credit card), but also in figuring out what it's going to cost you to have the freezer on a monthly basis. Of course, this isn't literally true. Once you've bought the freezer there wouldn't be any further cost if you left it in the garage unplugged. But for the purposes of evaluating the purchasing decision, we need to divide the purchase price by the life expectancy of the appliance. Ten years is the average life expectancy for a chest freezer. When you figure out the price, be sure to include any sales tax you would pay, as well as delivery charges if any. Then just divide the total cost by 120 (12 months x 10 years). This is your monthly cost of ownership.

Monthly electricity costs. Now you need to know how much you'll pay in electricity to keep the freezer cold. It so happens that the EnergyStar website also includes a nifty spreadsheet that will let you calculate the cost to run your freezer to a very high degree of accuracy. To use it though, you'll first need to know how much you pay the electricity company per kilowatt hour. If your bill looks like mine, figuring this out is very confusing. But somewhere on your bill there should be a total dollar amount for the month, as well as the kilowatt hours you actually used. Simply divide the dollars by the kilowatt hours, and you'll have the amount you're paying per kilowatt hour this month. It may vary from month to month. If you want to track this figure to find your average cost per kilowatt hour, go for it. But the calculation from any given month gives you something to work with. Plug that number into the spreadsheet, along with other details on the model of freezer you're considering. This will give you a figure for your monthly cost to keep the freezer running.

Now add the monthly cost of ownership to the monthly electricity cost to run it. This is your actual cost of keeping your chest freezer running. It's also the amount of money you need to save in food costs each month in order to just break even. Any savings over and above that amount will be money in your pocket.

So we've now come up with a specific dollar amount with which to make a purchasing decision. Tomorrow we'll discuss ways you might or might not recoup that cost, and some other pros and cons of ownership.