Another produce day and today was a HAUL! Peaches, Bosc pears, grape tomatoes, radishes, bananas, strawberries, red raspberries, broccoli, two huge stalks of celery, spinach, and leaf lettuce.
We also opted for two “tropical packs” which each contained a pineapple, a few kiwis, some limes, two mangos, a few unripe bananas, and a coconut.
Should be quite a week of juicing coming up!
The only down side of a food/produce co-op is that you usually have to pick it up at 7:00am–ON SATURDAY!
Other than that it’s a great deal. Today we got pears, apples, bananas, red plums, a honeydew melon, a single green and red bell pepper, four medium sized ears of corn, two bunches of celery hearts, two good handfuls of radishes, an acorn squash, a head of butter lettuce, bunch of red kale, and a brown paper lunch bag of yellow wax beans. Not too shabby!
The key now is to use it all before it goes bad 
Well, I feel a bit better about my plants dying. Apparently we didn’t research enough and for the region we live in (region 2, Chandler is at 1200 ft elevation above sea level) we planted most of our stuff waaaaaaay out of season. The few things that still are going are barely going, producing really small fruit, or dead.
I hereby dub this year Infrastructure Year as I’ll be getting all the beds ready, irrigation in place (I’ll discuss in a future post), and shade as needed. Here is a link to the guide that we will hence forth use to schedule our plantings:
http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/garden/mg/vegetable/guide.html
Bountiful Baskets is a conventional (and organic) food co-op here in Arizona and, recently, southern Utah. You “donate” $15 by Wednesday and get a “basket” of produce (roughly a $50 value!) which consists of two smaller baskets–one fruit, one vegetable. It’s a fantastic deal and you never know what you’ll get! Read the rest of this entry »
