Bountiful Baskets

I absolutely loved Bountiful Baskets when I was participating last year, but my schedule ended up always conflicting with the pickup time, as well as Vince's, so we had to stop. After reading about Sara getting Bountiful Baskets and seeing her pictures, I was reminded of how much I love it and decided to look into it again and see if there was another added pickup spot. There was! So now Vince and I are participating again! For those who don't know, here's a quick re-cap of how this works: basically you pay $15 (or $25 for organic) a week ahead of time to participate in a food co-op. Bountiful Baskets then buys cases of fresh fruits and veggies as locally as possible (think California instead of Mexico or China), then volunteers separate it into boxes the morning you pick it up. Because everything is volunteer run, you save a huge amount of money on the food because you aren't paying a store that needs to cover various bills. They claim that the average box 'retails' for about $50, so you save anywhere from $25-$35 depending on if you got a regular or organic box. I would agree with that statement!

This week (I'll get it every other week) I got an organic box for the first time. I was nervous that it would be a lot less food, and while it's a little less food when I compare it to what I got last year and what Sara got a few weeks ago, it's still a lot of food! This is what I got:

 

A lot of organic food for only $25! I don't buy all of my fresh food organic, but rather follow the 'dirty dozen' rule. I have the Environmental Working Group's Dirty Dozen app on my phone and I look at it every time I go shopping. It gives a list of the top 12 foods that have the most pesticides and should be eaten organic, and then also gives me a 'clean fifteen' list that are foods that should be safe if they're non-organic. All of these, with the exception of the watermelon(because it has a thick peel, it doesn't need a lot of pesticides), I would buy organic, so this was well worth it! From my memory, here's about what some items would cost organically if bought from the store: apples cost about $1.25-$1.50 each, so they're about $10. Plums are a little under $1 each, so about $6, lettuce in a bag like that would be $5, butter lettuce $2, bananas about $1 each, so $6, peaches about $2 each, so $4, cauliflower about $2 a pound, so $6, packs of bell peppers about $6, and personal watermelon about $4. So total, everything would be around $46, not including tax! So that puts us around the estimated $50 retail price when you add tax. Not bad.

Vince is particularly excited about juicing the apples, as am I because I want to make some fresh cider! Can you tell I'm excited for fall to be here?

I've already eaten half the watermelon and will be sad to see it be out of season soon. It's definitely one of my favorite fruits!

And does anyone know what these are?!