Givin' It Away

As I have spoken of in previous posts, I have a carrot glut this year.  I have made soups, awesome souffles, carrot cake, at this point -- you name it, if its got carrots in it, I've served it. Yet still I have about 30 pounds of carrots I simply have no practical use for.

I am giving most of those pounds to my lovely coworkers at the winery.

I guess if I was really enterprising I could sell them to someone, maybe by putting an ad on Craigslist.  Or I could give them to the Food Bank (although I'm not sure what kind of documentation I'd need to be a food provider there).  But it's easiest to just give them to people I know.

It was the same thing with eggs last year....when the girls were at their height of laying, I had leftover eggs galore, and I also took those in to the winery. Everyone was thrilled to get a dozen or so farm-fresh eggs.  Now that we've experienced our first big winter slowdown of laying, I wish I'd frozen more of them.  Eggs mixed with either a half-teaspoon of sugar (for baking) or salt (for general cooking) freeze great, and there have been times this year when we've run out of eggs.  But with the addition of a couple more hens, by late summer we should have another glut, and I will be able to put some up.

Leftover carrots and eggs....as table art?

But if you're committed to homesteading, one of the things you're committed to is using what you make, what you grow, and what your animals produce.  How do we justify spending money for feed and water, only to give away our harvests because we've got too much?

The fact is, we don't.  If this were the 1800's, I would put up every carrot we grew, and my family would have to content themselves with eating a lot (and I do mean a lot) of carrots over the next year or so.  But I have a modern family, and about the 5th night in a row I served carrots, you can be sure someone would say something.  We didn't grow up eating what was in storage, we grew up eating what our palate desired. Sheesh, it's hard enough to get people to eat leftovers around here.  A carrotpazooza might be all it takes to drive Big Ag and Groceries into Taco Bell on the way home, after which they'd just feign a mysterious lack of appetite when it came to my Carrot Surprise.

So the best solution seems to be to give those things we have in abundance to friends who will enjoy them.  It's probably not profitable, but it is a good turn, and my friends are thrilled with taking home some farm produce. 

And who knows, maybe sometime down the road it will inspire them to keep a garden or raise a few hens.  If I knew that was the case, I'd be thrilled, because I do believe in this lifestyle as a sustainable way of living, even though it is possible to have too much of a good thing (like eggs and carrots) at times.