That figure seems quite high doesn’t it, and so it should as £500 could buy you a huge amount of food. There are only two problems with achieving this level of savings, with the first being the time it takes to forage, and the second being how comfortable you are with eating certain things.
For example, at the time of writing this a small 200 gram bag of baby spinach is going for £1.50 at Sainsburys and could be eaten by just one person in a main meal. Nettle leaves have very similar nutritional values to spinach, and are even cooked in exactly the same way. All you need is a pair of gloves and you can fill a shopping bag with nettle leaves in under an hour in the right area.
Simply grab the stem at the base and run your hand firmly up to the top, pulling off all the leaves as you go. You can gather any amount you want using this method and as for the example, if you ate a 200 gram bag of £1.50 spinach every other day, that’s a total of just under £275 over the course of the year. It would take you no more than 30 minutes to stock up on nettles once a week, and that one ingredient gets you more than half way to the £500 mark.
The problem with spinach is that most people normally wouldn’t choose it for themselves, and certainly don’t eat it every other day. But for those who don’t like the taste there are so many other salad type leaves out there, and plants like burdock can grow in huge patches and make a great potato substitute.
Summer jams are another great saver, as they can last the whole year and if you find a good enough spot, you can gather a years supply of jam in a single day.
The best thing to do is find out what you have in your area and learn to use it as a replacement for the things you already eat. This is especially easy if you live near the coast as it adds seafood and plants like samphire to the menu. Whenever i go to the best cockleing spot in Wales, which is llansteffan by the way, i normally end up with a load of fresh cockles that would cost around £25 in the shops for the same weight.
Flavourings like making your own wild mustard and horse radish also go a long way when it comes to saving money, with homemade wild garlic sauce being a personal favourite.