Our neighborhood has the best produce market in the county.
Discarded greens from the local produce market
Yesterday afternoon I made my usual stop at TopOfTheHillQualityProduce to pick up their discarded greens. I’ve been doing this every day for almost 2 years now, and have built a great relationship with them. Now that spring is coming in, business is picking up and that means they generate more “garbage”. As I pulled into the parking lot, Francisco pulled out two 32 gallon buckets full of the usual debris of lettuce, spinach, cabbage & celery, and then pointed to a bonus of 5 cases of romaine lettuce. Woohoo! The tops had started to wilt so it no longer met the store’s quality threshold of perfection, so out it went.
I loaded it all into my car, left off the 2 empty Brute trash cans from the previous trip and hauled it all home. After a couple minutes of sorting out the bits of plastic & rubber bands, it was ready to go out to the geese & ducks. They love tearing into the heads of lettuce, and it does my heart good to see free food supporting the birds and the manure enriching the soil around the farm.
Turnips, carrots & root crops don’t help waterfowl much, so that gets directed to the goats. None of the animals have shown an interest in eggplant, asparagus or cabbage, so that gets hauled out to help expand my red wriggler worm farm & vermiculture system. Diversity is a wonderful thing!