posted 6 years ago
Bad, bad, bad
Giving 2 of my best pumpkins to my sister's friend around thanksgiving one year. When I asked at christmas what they did with them, she said threw them in the garbage. Apparently they were forgotten about in a shelf and turned from a nice light orange to a blue, almost moldy colour :) (har har)Gave a couple about a pound of my first ever crop of oyster mushrooms that I grew, and I'm 90% sure they threw them away. I had asked them 2 days later how the mushrooms tasted, and they replied "how what tasted?" "oh those, yes, good" - but from the tone I could tell they were being polite. (some people are really paranoid when dealing with home-grown mushrooms I've learned)
I give a certain family member around 20-30 pounds of food per year. The potatoes get eaten, but most of the tomatoes, beans, garlic , onions, etc, all gets shoved in a freezer or pantry. I wouldn't mind that...if they didn't buy onions, tomatoes and garlic from the store the following week. *hits head again wall* (the good news is they cleaned their freezer out this year, so I took all of my 2 year old produce back and used it up in a week.)A reverse point of view: a local family grows pumpkins for the stores at halloween. We moved our cows home in early November, and as we passed by their land I saw about 75+ rotting pumpkins in the field. I assume they weren't "store worthy" and so they were part of the typical "ugly food" waste. I would have loved to buy 20 of them even at full price back when they were in good condition - oh well, the deer must have enjoyed them.
The good-ish
Despite the 2 pumpkins rotting in the above tale, the other 4 people I gave excess to did use them to make pies. I've given various berries and herbs away every year that always end up getting used quickly.The only major feel-good story I can remember is in 2016, which was a great year for gardening: I was getting about 50 pounds of beans per week, for 5-6 weeks, so I ran around trying to give them away to everyone. Apparently the locals had enough beans for the year, so they took several bags to church on sunday, cut the ends off and gifted them to families in the next town over who had just immigrated to Canada.
Options I use now:
I could have given away 10's of pounds of lettuce, spinach and chard this fall, but the effort of finding people that wanted them didn't seem to be worth it, at least that's what my gut told me. So, I ate a lot of salad in September and left the rest to feed the soil for next year.
In the future, when I have enough land to really develop permaculture systems, I'll plan it out to only grow what annuals I need + 20% for excess that I give to close friends or barter with. The rest of the land will go into perennial plants, and if no one wants some of that excess produce from that, it can be like the lettuce this year and go back to the land, or the birds can have it, or whatever else is happy to eat it. Food Giveaways & Donations don't really work efficiently in the extreme rural area I'm in, and the amount of people who would eat the produce I grow is slim to none unfortunately - meat n' potato country.
I have the same sentiments as Su Ba: there is nothing worse than taking the time and effort to grow something for months, GIFT it to someone (usually after they admire it), and then it ends up being thrown away.
"Our ability to change the face of the earth increases at a faster rate than our ability to foresee the consequences of that change"
- L.Charles Birch
My Herbal Tea Store (CA)