The whey, that comes in buckets that we pick up every week and exchange with fresh clean buckets. The apples? We have to go pick them up....from the orchard floor. We pick up about 1000 pounds of apples every other week. Last year I was driving around asking door to door every time I saw a neglected apple tree. This is way easier. With two adults and three kids, it takes about 3 hours to fill the truck bed and the trailer. We could get more in a trip, I am working on how to stack bins inside the trailer to do that.
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| What I couldn't fit in bins the first run, I dumped in the truck bed. HUGE mistake. Very hard to get them out. |
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| We wash the apples with a power washer to try and make sure no residues are left from any sprays that might have been used. The orchard uses very little, but we are extra careful anyway. |
We cut our feed bills down quite a bit by doing this.
I know there are even more places doing this too. Where do you find free food for your family or livestock?
9 comments:
I forage at least as much for my goats, bunnies and chickens as I do for my family!
The goats really like evergreen branches, so after a good windstorm, I drive the truck around our end of town and scoop up the fallen limbs. We also advertise on Craigslist for fallen fruit, but it's a mixed bag. We've had perfectly beautiful fruit offered to us (which we ate!) and completely rotten, inedible junk.
It amazes me that people with an apple tree in their yard will just watch the fruit fall off and rot, but go to the store and buy apples!
I also make sure that when my friends pull their weeds and bolted veggies from their gardens, that they set it aside for my bunzos. ;)
I beyond to a gleaning group and it took us ages to find someone who wanted the windfalls that are sometimes unwanted, but we remove anyways to stop bears being attracted. If you have a local gleaning group it might be worth asking, or even joining, them.
I see so many apple and pear trees around here that are totally neglected..but don't have the guts to ask if we can pick.
I did get 84 blackberry pies for free...ya, 84. The company was going to throw them out because they had been in their huge storage freezer...and they couldn't sell them...so we ended up with them...and all we have to do is baked them...each one is sealed in wrap...they taste great.
We are down to about 60 as we are sharing with lots of people who come to visit.
Love this post.
Connie
We gleaned acorns from our yard for the first time last year. I researched how to process them and we enjoyed acorn flour gnocchi over the long winter. I've been looking forward to them this fall, but it seems like only the beech trees have nuts to drop. So this year, we will give the beech nut a try!
Do you have an scrap lumber you could use to make sides for your trailer?
This is great. Never heard of this stuff before. Yes, I have that much to learn. Thanks for sharing. :)
My in-laws used to have a deal with the local grocery store - twice a week they'd get all the fruits and veges that were too old to sell. (they fed most to the goats, but were able to pick out tons and eat for themselves. What is considered too old to sell is NOT bad food)
However, now the laws have changed and the grocery store isn't allowed to do that anymore....so all that "old" food is thrown into the trash. Such a shame, really.
Agreed - it's incredible what people buy when it's readily available outside for a little bit of time to gather it. I'm on a rabbit forum where a recent topic was where to buy dandelion seeds...as if there aren't thousands available in nearby lawns, parks, etc. And the poster was aware of that, she just seemed to feel that the store ones were "better" and was willing to search high and low for them.
-Angela
We get a truck and trailer load of bread from a local bakery, barrels that we place behind the local grocery store beside the dumpster, and the produce manager fills those up for us intead of putting it in the dumpster. Sometimes schools will allow you to place barrels for the lunch scraps, but they want it picked up daily.
Once I was friends with the owner of a trucking company, sometimes whole loads of refrigerated goods would be refused and they would have to get rid of them. After taking a pallet or two themselves they had a tried and true method, leave the trailer unlocked outside the front gate. Empty by morning with no disposal fee.
Now we get food by volunteering on farms, growing it ourselves, and just asking.
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