New Food Storage

First, happy Halloween! That's out of the way, so on to the real reason for posting.

Now that we live in a green and growing wonderland rather than the urban jungle, I have time and room for food storage.  The leaders in our church have been counseling us to have a year's supply of food and other necessities for decades, so I'm glad that I can finally comply with that counsel.

First, we needed supplies.  I was able to get these huge buckets for a steal off Craigslist (I love Craigslist!).

Now to fill them...

Hmmm...

I hear that fruit is a good thing to freeze and store.  What does Oregon have to offer?  Let's go to the local park!  Blackberries, growing wild!  We were able to pick two big buckets full of them.

The kids grew bored of picking after a while, so they found other ways to entertain themselves.  L2 fell asleep, and A1 and A2 decided to pick him some flowers.  Wasn't that nice?

And here's A1's interpretation of our activity:

[I like to pick blackberese. I got poked allot. A 5 9000 Pinke]

We're still working on spelling! A is for her name, 5 is for how old she is, 9000 is her estimate of how many berries we picked, and Pinke (pink) is her favorite color.

Well, now that we have discovered that we can fill these buckets with food, let's look for other places to do it, shall we?  What?  You have a friend that told you about Salem Harvest, a not-for-profit organization that helps local farmers pick their crops and in return the farmers donate their crops to food banks throughout the city?  Let's get involved!

The way it works is farmers harvest the easily-harvestable (yes, that is a word I just made up) part of their crop and sell it.  The rest would just go to waste, so they allow Salem Harvest volunteers to pick the rest of their crop which is completely donated to whichever food banks need it.  Salem Harvest entices volunteers to show up by allowing us to keep half of what we pick, free of charge.

Here we are picking onions with Salem Harvest.

As a family, we were able to pick 150 lbs of onions.  We decided to only keep 50 lbs, which now that I look at the buckets of onions in my garage is way more than we really need.  So if anyone has any good recipes that involve a lot of onions, I would be interested.

We also participated in an apple harvest and were able to keep about 50 lbs of apples.  As I was using my handy peeler-corer-slicer to prepare the apples for apple pie filling, I ran my hand through the slicer part.  Three knuckles needed repair; luckily R was home so he whipped out his medical kit and stitched me up.  I'm just now getting the use of those fingers back.  Next time I'll have to be a little more careful.