How many times have you purchased fresh delicious looking fruits and vegetables at a farmer’s market on a Saturday only to find it lurking in your refrigerator a week or so later looking less than delicious, soft, squishy, in fact, a little furry? I’ve learned over the years not to buy fresh fruits and veggies more than a couple of days in advance. However, since we now get a weekly C.S.A. (Community Supported Agriculture) from Aqua Linda Farm, I have had to find ways to prolong veggie goodness.
According to AzSustainably.com in a post entitled Less waste, more taste: maximize your produce you should:
- Buy local: We start out by picking up our produce as close to the delivery time as possible and cart it home in an ice chest. Then I spent about an hour washing and packaging and putting it away. Having grown up on a family farm, I think it’s important to support small family farms in my own community.
- Start a garden: We have fruit trees but no garden at this point. I’ll have to do something about the bunnies in our yard first. They are so bold they come up to the patio door and look inside.
- Buy less, more often: Now that we have a weekly delivery I supplement with veggies every couple of days if I need to although I find I do that less and less. I used to use a lot of mushrooms when I cooked but southern Arizona is not a hotbed for fungi. I have my choice of white button mushrooms, portobello and sometimes cremini. I have found that you can get almost every kind of pepper under the sun!
- Store your produce properly and strategically: I use Evert-Fresh Green bags and organic cotton drawstring bags for storage. Rarely do I have a problem losing veggies and they still taste fresh by the end of the week. I lost some snow peas because I washed them and find out I shouldn’t have. I printed out the fruit and vegetable storage chart from AZSustainbly.com’s post and put it on the refrigerator for future reference.
You can print a .pdf version of the vegetable storage chart by clicking on veggie-chart.
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Welcome to Verda Vivo. My name is Daryl Warner Laux.
Thanks for spreading the word. :c) Nice blog.
Tracy, Keep up the good work on AZSustainably! Daryl
You have a great blog! Thanks for the link and spreading the word about keeping veggies fresh.
Let me know if you would ever like to contribute posts to azsustainably. We could use some perspective from southern Arizona. Most of us are around Phoenix.
I do use the wonderful produce bags and they are a great help in preserving fresh foods. One other food item I discovered does very well kept in a green bag and that is cheese. I have tried keeping cheese in plastic wrap but that is not as successful as I would like and drying out on the end does occur, the green bag seems to prevent that problem, that is great.
Jaypea
Jaypea, Thanks for the tip on using the green bags for storing cheese. I never would have thought about using it for that! Of course I don’t have to worry too much about that since cheese doesn’t last very long at our house. I seem to be married to a very big mouse who loves his cheese!
James, Thanks for the compliment. I will keep your offer to contribute to AZSustainably in mind! ~ Daryl
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.