Things are tough all over!
A couple of years ago I built and installed a small fixture in the front yard, just below the street library and christened it the street pantry.(F&V) The idea was that I would put the excess produce that we grew in there and people could take what they want, as they wanted it. In reality, the produce could sit in there for days or weeks before someone claimed it. For that reason I could not put anything leafy in there, it would look pretty sad within a day or so and I would have to compost it. That was my thought behind growing stuff like silver beet in bathtubs in the front yard, so people could harvest their own, but that is another story!
Anyway, that is the way things ran up until about a month ago. I had a brilliant new idea of putting things like ginger root, Jerusalem artichokes and carrots into plastic takeaway food containers to keep them fresh as they sat there waiting to be claimed. Coincidentally, as soon as I started doing that (as well as oranges, mandarines, chokoes and a couple of other bits of produce we had going) the pantry would get cleaned out almost every day! Mostly they would leave the food containers and just take the produce, and I did see one guy who returned them empty, and he was looking a bit rough, poor fella!
It seems that the cost of food has bitten people hard around here and they are taking advantage of what they can get. The F&V pantry gets cleaned out regularly and does not stay filled up for more than a day and sometimes multiple times in one day. I have even had it when on one occasion I had just topped it up in the morning, gone out to add something less than fifteen minutes later and everything was gone!
Also, recently when I went shopping (after NBJ of course!) and looked at the price of grocery items. We buy in bulk, grow stuff and cook from scratch so we do OK, but as an example, 3 litre tins of olive oil we used to buy for a bit over $25 are now retailing for $60!
All this got me thinking.
What if we added a pantry that was designed for groceries for people to take away as well as the F&V street pantry? So that’s what I decided to do!
I wanted to use as much of the stuff hanging around to construct it as I could, but I really didn’t have a cabinet or cupboard suitable, or the raw materials to make one from scratch. I let people know what I was looking for, and checked out any hard rubbish piles to see if I could pick up a freebie, and even tried the occasional tip shop, all to no avail!
That eventually lead me to our local Sallies and, low and behold, they had an old stereo cabinet type of thing for the vast sum of $10! It had two glass doors in front (so people could see what was on offer), but it also was on wheels and an open space at the back (which I didn’t want!) but most importantly it was about the right size, not too huge to fill up, but big enough to hold some groceries.
I wanted to install it next to the street library and F&V pantry so I dug down into the raised garden about 100mm and filled it with sandstone gravel to give it a flat and level base. As luck would have it, the Besser blocks I had could be configured so that they were almost exactly the same footprint as the cabinet. I played around a bit, unsure if I wanted two or three layers of blocks but in the end, three layers seemed to get it to the best height. I also tried putting a couple of 300mm x 300mm concrete pavers on the top, but they did not seem to add anything to the stability, so I removed them.
With the support now completed I turned to the cabinet itself. The first trick was to remove the four wheels from the bottom of the cabinet. I thought they were screwed in, but it turned out they were a push fit and were easily removed by application of my favourite pair of pliers. As previously mentioned, there was a section of the back missing, no doubt to allow wiring to be fed through, and I had some old Masonite, which I cut to size and the affixed to the back with 20mm tacks.
That left the roof! After a bit of searching around, I found a piece of mini-orb (mini corrugated steel sheet) that was roughly the right size. I cut a piece of 70mm x 19mm pine salvaged from the green chook tractor to go across the front of the cabinet so that rain would drain off to the back and screwed that on the top of the cabinet at the front. I then screwed on the mini-orb to the top of the cabinet and we were ready to go!
Linda insisted on fitting a piece of hose across the leading edge of the roof just in case anyone cut themselves on it, and applying a couple of stoppers to the front corners. Anyway, after that we were ready to go!
At the moment everything is still experimental, what to put in and how often are issues that I am still working on. The first stocking up (see below) lasted a day and then it all went the second night.
