Last Saturday, we went out foraging with our local mushroom club and collected 8 pounds of chanterelles. We had a mushroom omelet for dinner that night and a mushroom curry and mushroom pasta the next day. The rest of the shimmering chanterelles went into a gigantic pot and simmered on the stove with other ingredients until the combination could properly be called a stew.
Some of it we ate as soon as it was done. The remainder, we popped in our freezer for later consumption along with the leftover curry. We are living large.
Finding the time to forage and farm
The mushroom club was foraging before we retired too, but we never tagged along with them back then. We couldn’t give up a Saturday morning for it; we had too much to do. We had grass to mow, a toilet to scrub, clothes to launder for the upcoming week. You know how it is.
But even though we didn’t forage much before we retired, we did make time for a garden. And this year, with so much more free time on our hands, we went beyond our backyard and joined our neighborhood community garden. The plot was $50, and we probably spent about that much on plants.
It was worth it. We haven’t bought produce all summer.
Not everything we’ve eaten this year came from our yard, the community garden, or the woods around our house though. Some of it was given to us. Yes, for free.
Eat free or die; that’s my new motto
I’m always looking for ways to save money. So when neighbors at my new home in Florida told me where I could pick up some free groceries at the weekly Farm Share distribution, I was full of questions.
I found out that Farm Share is a nonprofit agency geared toward addressing two problems (1) food insecurity and (2) the wastefulness of the food production system. It does this by taking unsellable food from farmers and distributing it for free to Florida citizens.
