My Aunt works in the bakery at a Winn Dixie...she saves the buckets that they get frosting in for all those cakes, cookies, cupcakes, they decorated. Usually, she will have 3 gallon and 1 gallon....sometimes 5 gallon. Often they just throw those things away because that frosting is hard to wash out. She's about the only one that will wash them out where she works....She grew up on a dairy farm....and knows the value of a good bucket..
I've tried to wrestle some away from the farms I go to, but like us, they won't let go of their buckets. I have a few from my horse owning days, but alas, no more. I'll be making phone calls this week, thanks for the ideas!
We got in the habit of only aquiring food grade buckets, so we don't have to label or check the bucket each time we use it. We also make sure we have a few buckets set aside for food use only, i.e. for making pickles.
Can I assume (there is that word!!! ) that if I get buckets that had food in them that they are food grade? Since I have only stored food in glass thus far, I haven't paid attention to how to tell the difference. I think it has to do with the recycling number on all plastics....enlighten, please!
You can assume that if food came in it, that it is food grade. I believe there is a way to tell by some number, but I don't know it. Any food company in the U.S. would have to use food grade plastic.
And, I would assume that imported foods would also have to be in food grade plastic.
Plastic is also absorbant. So don't use a plastic container that you have mixed lets say 'paint' in, for food. Think about this: "you can smell through plastic", if it is thin enough. Plastic is porous.
We won't use a bucket that at one time stored dry chicken poop for making pickles, no matter how well we clean it!
Nor will we use a bucket that FIL stored his pesticide in for anything related to food. (The only pesticide we use is: chickens)
The food grade buckets that I bought earlier this spring have the number 4 on the bottom. That's the only thing that I could find that identifies them. Hope this helps.
Today we finished phase one of our planting. Between yesterday and today, we got in: 3 rows of sweet corn, blue lake beans, cranberry beans, two rows of pepper plants, summer squash, two rows of tomato plants, two rows of sunflowers, basil plants, carrots and cucumber plants.
The rats demolished our sunflower seed harvest last summer and I am winnowing what is left. Every handfull of good seed counts. Sunflowers are our cash crop and we plant them continuously all summer long. Good thing we had stashed some away from prior years.
I made banana nut breads using some over-ripe bananas that FIL had brought over and lemons from one of our lemon trees. My recipe calls for wheat germ, which I rarely have, so I substituted oatmeal. I think it is a good alternate healthy ingredient and gives a nice flavor. Hopefully that will take care of the boys' sweet tooth, I might even have one with my homemade peach or blackberry jam.
The adult chickens are now banished to the hen yard. They have not been allowed in it all winter. So they they are having fun right now. Now we cannot let them roam the field anymore, because they will dig up all our seed. Once things are going, we will let them out for an hour in the evening.
I have harvested the timothy grass that volunteered to grow in the hen yard and it will supply our rabbit with his requirement for the rest of the year. Now I just need to find a safe place to store it.
We will try to sell the remaining tomato and pepper plants that we don't need. I am thinking of placing an ad on Craigs list. I have never done that before.
Tomorrow I have to take my foster kittens back to the Humane Society so they can be "fixed" and put up for adoption. Then I'll get to clean up after them. I'll need to wash/sterilize everything they used and store it for the next batch of kittens.