Another Friday brought another opportunity to drop off some eggs at a local food pantry.
We only had 4 dozen eggs to donate - limited egg supplies in the local grocery stores has more friends and family asking us for eggs - but the folks working at the pantry were still quite appreciative of the delivery.
I asked about any food waste they had that they wanted hauled away, and was pretty surprised by the bounty they offered up:
There was a lot of things the flock will really love...some greens, bananas, peppers, watermelon, tomatoes, and bread.
There was some things the chickens probably won't eat, including some onions and lemons, but I'm happy to haul all they have away for them so it doesn't end up in the landfill. We'll be dumping the food waste onto a bed of leaves we've been collecting from neighbor's yards the last few weeks. Whatever the chickens don't eat they'll mix into the leaves and eventually decompose down into some nice compost.
Any recyclable packaging will be rinsed and recycled. The cardboard boxes will be broken down and saved for use as poop boards under the roost in the roosts in the big coop (after they're used for that, they'll be composted).
That's 4 dozen eggs donated, a pile of food kept out of the landfill, and much of the packaging recycled or composted instead of landfilled.
Days like this get me really excited to get more chickens laying and eating food waste.
Update
Spent Saturday morning opening, cutting, and piling the food waste. It's messy work, and some of the stuff was a little gag inducing (slimy watermelon and way old salad greens were the worst) but there was a lot of great stuff in there.
The food all got piled up into a pile of leaves in the run for easy covering once the chickens eat their fill. The cardboard was either saved for future use or composted, depending on it's condition, plastic containers were recycled, and the only landfill-bound items from the entire truckload fit into a couple of small bread bags.
A picture of the "snack" pile:
