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One Hundred Dollars a Month

I am your typical housewife living in high maintenance suburbia. I have a handsome husband, 2 kids and a flock of pet chickens. I try and feed my family with $100 a month. With the help of coupons, gardening and bartering I am able to squeeze the most out of our grocery budget and still manage to have a little fun along the way.

How to Glean Fruit and Vegetables – Free Apples

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By on · 31 Comments

Yesterday, The Girl Who Thinks She’s a Bird and I went to a nearby field to glean some apples.  We have been scoring free apples from this not so secret spot every fall since we came a crossed it a few years ago.

My neighbor Chino the Handyman even knows about it.  But The Girl and I beat him to the tree this year, and we were able to harvest 38 pounds of apples with our rinky dink 6 foot ladder.  Chino will have to bring his 10 foot ladder if he wants some. Ha!

When it comes to gleaning, you shouldn’t be to picky.  After all, these apples are for making homemade apple sauce, not for selling on a street corner.  A few blemishes here are there can simply be cut out and fed to the chickens.  The wee bit of  extra work it takes to prepare the apples, far outweighs having to purchase applesauce at the grocery store every year.

Here are a few of my favorite gleaning tips –

    • Always ask first, even if there is a sign out saying FREE.
    • Thank the people profusely for letting you glean the fruits of their labor.
    • Try to offer something as a token of your appreciation.
    • Don’t be greedy, leave plenty for others.
    • If the owners encourage you to PLEASE, TAKE IT ALL, then go ahead and take as much as you know you’ll be able to use.

Am I the only one who does this?

Have you gleaned anything yet this year?

Does your husband think you are a total weirdo for doing this?  Mine does. Ha!

~Peace Out Girl Scouts… I’ve got some work to do.

♥ Mavis 

Also read about how we gleaned over 30 pounds of fresh plums.

The Apple Lover’s Cookbook celebrates the beauty of apples in all their delicious variety, taking you from the orchard to the kitchen with recipes both sweet (like Apple-Stuffed Biscuit Buns and Blue Ribbon Deep-Dish Apple Pie) and savory (like Cider-Brined Turkey and Apple Squash Gratin).

The Apple Lover’s Cookbook offers a full-color guide to fifty-nine apple varieties, with descriptions of their flavor, history, and, most important, how to use them in the kitchen. ~ Amazon

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Comments

  2. We glean potatoes. In Idaho. Surprise surprise – ha ha. We’ve done one this year. Will probably do another here pretty quickly. I got a lead on an onion field to glean which we have never been able to do, so that’d be cool if we could…

    Reply

  3. I have an apple spot in my town that is free. I live up north from you. My kids don’t like the applesauce from it, so I made bags and bags of fruit leather from it (and added in other fruits to spice it up). My kids swear it’s better than the fruit leather you get at Costco. I agree. And I love it because I put agave in it, so i know it has less sugar. One of my MUSTS- less sugar.

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  4. I just cleaned pears last Friday and got about 50 lbs. We are waiting for the okay to glean apples from an orchardist friend. That’s the lovely thing about living in Central WA Apple Capital the World 😉 .. we always have access to fresh, very cheap and frequently free produce. LOVE it!

    Reply

    • 100 pounds? What did you do with all of them? Have you ever tried dehydrating them? They are great mixed in oatmeal cookies.

      Reply

  6. So jealous. Living in So Cal we don’t even get good deals on fresh apples! I just paid $1.88 a pound for Honeycrisp apples and that was a cheap price for that type!

    We lived in Massachusetts for a few years back in the 90s and I fell in love with Empire apples (cross between Red Delicious and MacIntosh). We have been missing them really badly, so I just bought a bushel (96 apples) from an orchard in Vermont for $118 with shipping. Expensive, but I can’t wait to get them. That’s my big splurge this season!

    Reply

  7. I might have gleaned some plums from a neighbor’s tree….but hey, no one lives there and the house is a foreclosure! I couldn’t resist, I haven’t had those type of plums since I was a kid at my grandmother’s house 🙂

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  9. Mavis, in the children’s book Applesauce the husband is too chicken to knock on the people’s door.What is it with men? Such chickens! At least he does go collect the apples.

    P.S. I didn’t supply that excerpt on Amazon. Question marks instead of apostrophes! Grrrr.

    P.P.S. I’m sorry you had to miss J & J’s donut party yesterday.

    Reply

  11. I usually glean a lot of my fruit for canning, this year I have:
    Italian plums
    Green Plums
    Green Grapes
    Concord Grapes
    Pears
    Apples
    Peaches (some, had to buy a few)
    Asian Pears (My mom has 3 trees)
    Apricots (my favorite, everyone but me has a tree)
    Black Walnuts
    Tomatoes

    Reply

    • Black walnuts? Those are hard to find. What state are you in? I wonder if I can grow black walnuts up here in the Seattle Area?

      Reply

  12. Love it! We picked/gleaned apples 2 weeks ago from a friends yard who gave us permission and in exchange we gave them some tuna steaks and homemade blueberry jam in exchange!

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  13. Apricots, Italian plums from a bowl marked free on the side of the road, plums marked free on the classifieds. Apples and some raspberry plants from my neighbor that felt bad about them going to waste. The raspberries were suckers growing up under the fence from the neighbor in the bit below.

    I’m contemplating the crabapples down the street. The mom just had a baby and they are renting for only a short time longer. They aren’t interested in all the fruit the previous owner (friend of ours) planted.

    Reply

  14. My husband doesn’t think I’m weird for gleaning because he’s out there with me! He works with many of the nurseries in the Willamette Valley so we have access to lots of farms and we’ve picked apples, pears and plums this year. I’ve made applesauce, pie filling and apple pie jam(turned out a little runny, but still tastes great). Oh yes, and apple cake with cream cheese icing. That didn’t last 2 days!

    Reply

  16. How do you find spots to Glean?

    Over the weekend we went to an orchard up in Charlottesville and picked a bunch of apples! I’ve never been before, and it was amazing!! Tons of Fujis, a few other varities and they had just opened the granny smith that day, so they were everwhere!!!

    And I thought of you last week, I bought a bunch of canning supplies for half off at Lowe’s!! I get to finally learn how! and I’m totally going to try your apple pie jam first with all of these fresh apples!!! Thanks again for being so inspiring!!

    Reply

  17. I’ve gleaned black walnuts as well, in Ohio. Also apples, which I made a killer pull apart apple strudle just today.

    Reply

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Mavis Butterfield Etsy