Frugaly Weezy: Fruit & Veggies

I'm a member of a local fruit and vegetable co-op. I joined about 6 months ago and LOVE it! Once a fortnight members of the group head Downtown to a local fruit and vegetable wholesalers and buy produce for the 12 members. They then split the produce and we pick up the baskets.

This was my first week's basket back in August - can I hear you say, "yum"????

Well, this weekend was my weekend to do the shop. I had a new partner whom I had never met, but had spoken to once on the phone. I got up at 4.45 on Saturday morning and drove down to my partner's house. We then drove Downtown and got to the wholesalers at around 6am.

If you've never been to a wholesalers it can be a little daunting, but these guys are really friendly and I felt as this was my second shop there that I sort of knew what I was doing.

We had $210 to spend on the 12 baskets, so had lots to play with.

First you head into the shop and pick up the list with the prices of all the produce, then you go back to your car and decide what you want to buy for everyone. This is the hard part, trying to find what's good value and what you want the basket to consist of. We quite often end up with three heads of celery which drives me nuts, as I have NO IDEA what to do with that much celery! We wrote out what we wanted, then went back inside to order everything we wanted. There was a slight language barrier and we almost ended up with papayas instead of pineapples, but we sorted everything out in the end. You then head back to the car to wait for all the goodies.

This is what $210 worth of fruit and vegetables looks like.

Once it's been loaded into the back of the car we set off back to the house where we split it all up into the 12 baskets. We had help from my partner's friends, who are also members of the co-op.