How I get 40-60 lbs of produce for just $10!
When it gets down to it, there are two levers of money. One lever is to make more of it and the other is to spend what you have efficiently (frugality).
Everything in the personal finance world is just details on tweaking your levers.
My family doesn't make much more than the average US income, but by careful use of these two levers we live well and are able to accumulate wealth. Saturday is an important day for me to work these levers.
The first is by hustling garage sales and estate sales for items to resell.
One way I handle the second is by buying 40-60 lbs of produce for just $10!
Living in southern Arizona has some benefits. Mild winters. Many blue sky days. A low cost of living. And super cheap produce.
Tucson is on the route that many produce shippers use, truck and rail. This has a side bonus of a constant supply of produce that needs to move fast. Vegetables that have some sort of problem.
They will spoil before they get to their destination. Supermarket reject boxes that might just not look good (but still are). Oversupply. Whatever you can think of.
These businesses donate the food to the local food banks in huge quantities for a tax write off. The food banks have so much that to make use of it they give it away in exchange for a $10 donation. Turning it into cash helps them provide other food for the people that need it.
I have lived here for about 2 years, and word of this great deal has seemed to spread. It is getting pretty packed when I go now.
Still, worth waiting in line for the haul.
The amount of veggies we have obtained from them pushed me to learn how to can things.
Over the years I have canned so many pickles and turned hundreds of tomatoes into pasta sauce that we no longer buy pickles. As for pasta sauce, well let's just say that my household never has too much pasta sauce.
Produce On Wheels With Out Waste
P.O.W.W.O.W. Is the acronym. It is operated by the Borderlands food bank. They claim that 30 million pounds of produce is rescued and distributed each year throughout southern Arizona.
They have saved me hundreds of dollars since I have lived here.
My family adjusts our meals based on what produce we received from them each week. It has led to discovery of new recipes.
When they offered dozens of zucchini's one week, my wife turned them into a vegetarian zucchini spaghetti.
I've turned some of the tomatoes that didn't end up as pasta sauce into a delicious summer tomato salad with olive oil and oregano.
We've done a multitude of things with the different squashes we have received each week.
What I am trying to say is that not only are we getting a great deal, we break out of our culinary shell. The food we never normally buy is there, so we search out a way to use it. If we just shopped at a grocery store, we never would have bought it in the first place.
Our Haul This Week
4 Acorn Squash
5 Corn
6 lbs Tomatillo
12 Roma Tomato
16 Round Tomato
13 Organic Green Peppers
13 Red Peppers
1 lb Grape Tomato
3 Eggplant
2 lbs Anaheim Chile Peppers (New Mexico Peppers)
They ran out of two items: spaghetti squash and bagged lettuce.
I ended up running down to the local supermarket later in the day to get a few ingredients my wife needed for a dish she is bringing to a party on Sunday. I took a few photos of the prices for the produce we got from the POWWOW.
- Acorn Squash $1.49lb X (let's say 6 lbs total) = $8.94
- 5 Corn X .89 = $4.45
- Tomatoes (say 3 per lb, we received 28 so 9 1/3rd lbs) X .99 = $9.24
- Both peppers were marked .99ea, we had 26 = $25.74
- 16oz Grape Tomatoes @ 1.99 per 10oz = $3.18
- 3 Eggplants X $1.49ea = $4.97
They were not selling the anaheim chile peppers or tomatillos. I would say that $1.99 per lb for the peppers and .99lb for the tomatillos is fair. Combined that adds another $9.93.
Total Price = $66.45!
For just $10. What a deal!
Some of the peppers were getting soft, so I took some time to dice them up and bag them for the freezer for preservation. Some meals in the future will have the prep time reduced.
I don't know if you can find deals like this where you live, but have you really looked for them? There are people here in Tucson that still don't know about these cheap veggies. Maybe it would be worth a search.
By using the lever of frugality and efficient purchasing, I have more money for investing. Who doesn't like saving money? Especially on food, something we all need!
Now I just have to figure out what to do with these tomatillos. I ate one and they taste similar to a granny smith apple and a tomato mixed. My wife said they were too sour for her, so it looks like it falls to me to use them up!
If anyone has any idea what to do with them, please let me know in a comment. Thanks!
My Website: DoublingDollars.com
Wow I need to move to AZ! what a great deal.
It's great to be on the first stop for the produce as it moves into the country! Less logistic expenses means cheaper things!
Fresh corn in February!
Yea, seems like it was getting close to the end of its expectancy and had to be moved before it went bad.
Actually I was a bit envious. I live in an area where we have a year round bounty of vegetables, but don't usually have fresh corn until June.
At the Mexican corn harvest time, I see corn on the cobb selling for between 8-12/per dollar!
That is a great backdoor idea to getting good old fruit and veg for a substantially decreased amount of $$$. Thank you for the tip!
Have literally been checking my blog everyday to see if you've had something new posted. Please don't leave Steemit, bro!
It's been a pretty busy time for me. I had to clear out of Qatar, so spent days making sure everything was good for turnover. When I got home I was hit with 6 months worth of chores that needed doing. About a week before I got home a tree in my backyard blew over and I tackled that in and amongst the rest of the stuff that needed doing.
I have a few weeks off work to get things in order, so hopefully can write a few posts for steemit.
No probs, bro. I totally get that there is life outside Steemit, lol. I hope everything is well now and you sorted out that tree and the build-up of all your other responsibilities. Really hope to see you on here again soon.
Take care, my friend....
What an amazing idea, think I might look into this kind of thing myself as I love to cook and bake a lot myself. Thank you for an amazing post.
Yea, I don't know if other areas of the country/world have things like this but its worth a look into for sure.
I'm sure there is something like this around the world, it's just finding it :-) looking forward to reading more on your food adventures in the future.
That's awesome. My organic grocer has these bio bags for the produce that seem to preserve the produce significantly longer than a typical bag or container- may be worth exploring buying some of those bags for your situation- I love Arizona
I hadn't heard about them so I did a quick search. Is it something like this? https://www.amazon.com/Debbie-Meyer-GreenBags-Freshness-Preserving-Storage/dp/B00I4V1U06
I was thinking these bags.... http://biobagusa.com/products/commercial/shopping-produce-bags/
Those are what my grocer uses- I thought they somehow repelled gases or gases from forming that spoils the veggies but I think these bags are simply biodegradable as opposed to engineered for food preservation- my mistake. My veggies stay fresh for a long time but it's probably because they are all organic as opposed to the bags. The bags you posted I think do actually work for preservation. I know from experience that organic milk stays good far longer than the milk with hormones and chemicals.
Oh yea, I saw the bio bags and read that they just break down easier so I looked for something like you described.
Veggies staying fresh can be for a couple different reasons, one is to give them lots of air in the veggie drawer of the fridge. Packed too tightly the decomposition gasses become denser and end up spoiling the veggies faster.
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Thanks for the tip! I'm a single mom and I need all the help I can get with both levers. I will do some research on how to do this in my local area.
As for the tomatillos, they make excellent green salsa or chile verde!
I've read that food banks everywhere are inundated with ripe bananas. So much that they will give them away to anyone that needs them. If you like banana bread, it might be a good way to obtain some ripe bananas for free.
Thanks for the tomatillos tip!