Wanted to share a few updates on the happenings this week, the last one of April, 2020. I'm writing this on Thursday, April 30th, and the weekend in front of us looks like it's going to be a beautiful one. So excited to see the weather warming up and more opportunities to get work done.
On Wednesday evening, we stopped by the food pantry run by a local church. With the jump in need, they have gone from being open once a month to once a week. They were the location of our first egg donation this year, and all donations we made prior to 2020. We were able to drop them 3 dozen eggs. We'll add them to our weekly rounds. Although we won't always have a lot of eggs to bring, we'll do what we can!
If you've been reading along on the blog, you know we've been doing a drop-off/pick-up every Friday at the food pantry that has been giving us their food waste. Today, they called me and said they had a bunch of produce today and were hoping I could come pick it up before they opened at 1 PM. So, at lunchtime my son and I headed over and got a nice load of produce (pictured above).
I like that every time we get food waste from them it's something a little different - milk, fruit/veggies, and grains. The loads have included everything from organic milk to crackers and cookies to baby food.
I must admit, while I love the fact that we get to do a lot of recycling and composting of packaging with the packaged goods like crackers, cookies, and pastas (keeping a lot of materials out of the landfill), they are a LOT of work to process.
These produce loads are very quick to open any limited packages, remove produce stickers, and dump on the compost pile. The chickens really seem to enjoy them! We also were able to drop off a dozen eggs, some of which were collected moments before we got in the truck to drive over. Tough to get a fresher egg than that!
We're now roughly 6 weeks from our very first donation (give or take a few days). We're in year 0, and have a long way to go in the coming months, but in 6 weeks we've donated 26 dozen eggs (312 eggs). We've also picked up 5 loads of food waste, ranging from small-ish right up to an overflowing pickup bed full.