Produce On Wheels - With Out waste

Cheap Veggies!!!! I love Borderland's amazing produce rescue program. On a Saturday schedule at various community organizations in Tucson and Phoenix volunteers coordinate the veggie pickups. You pay $10 cash and take your own box, crate, or some grocery bags and load up 60 pounds of fruits and vegetables. Each Saturday they have a different assortment of vegetables which is posted on their Facebook and website. Usually between 7am and 10am. Program runs during produce season, November through August. Produce available, from my understanding, is whatever they couldn't market and is tagged to be trashed. Perfectly good stuff, some of the peppers may be funny shapes with a few blemishes, and some things may be closer to their spoiling point, but for the most part it's perfect. This weekend we went to the pickup at St. Francis in the Foothills church on Swan and East River. For $10 you were allowed to take 37 Roma tomatoes, 4 butternut squash, 11 pickling cucumbers, 3 mini watermelons, 11 yellow bell peppers, 11 orange bell peppers, 11 yellow squash, and 1 bag mini sweet bell peppers. The variety and amount of each veggie you can take always changes, but it always equals about 60 pounds. We almost always split our box with a friend because it is too much for our household of two. Totally worth it if you can get yourself up and out of the house early on a Saturday.

This is a phenomenal service. $12 for 70 lbs of produce. It's all pre-sorted so you just have to show up and fork over your $12. Then go through the lines and pick up the specified number of each item. The produce and quantity change from week to week as do the locations!! Check their website for the latest schedule which is published a month or so in advance. Do not rely on this listing as the only location. They go from Sahuarita to Phoenix. You can also join their email blast to get updates each Thursday with the produce for the week. Check it out!!

Some weekends/seasons are better than others as far as selection. I love getting my produce on Saturdays and processing (chopping/sealing/freezing) or prepping the vegetables for the week. It's a great value and encourages me to try new things. I like knowing that I'm curbing food waste.

The firt time I went, it was great. The volunteers were kind. They saw I was struggling due to infirmity and they let my sister pull the vehicle up close and helped us load everything in. The second time I had to do it all myself, for both me and my sister, and I got told I was being greedy for buying two load,s, even though we were sharing with other family members, too. They shamed me, patently refused to give me some of what they gave the people ahead of me double amounts of and which they gave to some people behind me in line, too. Told me I was greedy and selfish. I got mocked for crying and was told that I should have known better than to be so selfish and they laughed when some of my food got stolen. The veggies were mostly okay, though. The grapes were all rotten. The third time I went, years later, I got one load and they gave me most of the things they gave other people but the volunteer handing out the paper towels literally threw them at me and said "I guess you have to get every free thing you can!" They gave me several boxes of dates. The veggies were good. The fourth time everything was rotten except a few only semi okay veggies. Less than 7 lbs total. I would have gotten a better deal from the grocery store. They were definitely playing favorites among both known people and for other reasons. The fifth and last time I went we ordered ahead and they were just going to load us up. They only loaded up for one family but three of us came. Then, after a lot of arguing, they grudgingly gave us three rolls of paper towels and two boxes of dates and called it good. I hear very good things about this organization. So, I am thinking it is more about the volunteers they happen to get in certain neighborhoods. The first time we went, we drove pretty far out of our way and it was great. The other times were all in the Sacred Heart Parking lot except one time when it was nearer to this area of town but not quite that close.

Total hit & miss. Be sure you have a compost bin in the backyard. My last order consisted of 5 out of 5 rotten & moldy & liquidy English cucumbers, 3 out of 3 rotten mini watermelons, one tiny acorn squash, 5 smashed tomatoes on the vine, a BUNCH of very old dried up green summer squash that had to be used the same day at best, maybe a dozen half way rotten pickling cucumbers. 6 bags of mini peppers and 2 trays of cherry tomatoes were surprisingly fresh & good. Time prior to this batch consisted of many melons (only watermelons were good) and a crazy amount of old & tired cucumbers and squash as well.I have to get up early on Saturday to pick up the box and haul everything from the trunk (I'm a senior) only to find out less than half of their rescued produce is edible every time, and I have to haul rotten watermelons and cucumbers to the backyard for compost. I calculated what's edible can be purchased from regular grocery stores for just a few dollars more. The rest is hauling from the car, checking freshness, and hauling again to the compost bin. I personally find it ridiculous that I have to pay for rotten produce.I love and appreciate the concept, but it's not difficult to feel the tips of English cucumbers or find soft black spots on watermelons. I feel they make up the weight with rotten produce that's very easily identified while boxing them up. Surely I can understand some bruises or "almost bad" in the box, but I personally find it unacceptable after finding all cucumbers and all watermelons were rotten. I'll be more than happy to pay the same amount of money for HALF of "NOT rotten" produce to support the organization, but my backyard is not a landfill.