Abundance woes?! Surely abundance is a good thing? As @eco-alex has pointed out, it can become a bad thing when our abundance becomes an excess and leads to waste. This week's @ecotrain Question of the Week asks us when we had an abundance of something and what we did about it.
I was once having a conversation with my neighbour about his garden changes. He's not a keen gardener and is away from home quite a lot, so he wanted something that was easy to deal with and minimal maintenance. He mentioned that he’d had an apple tree at one point, but got rid of it because they didn't eat many apples, then it just dropped the excess ones and he had to deal with them. So his solution was to get rid of the cause of the abundance and chop down the tree.
I knew what he meant. When we first bought our house we inherited some fruit trees with it and the second year of apples was so abundant we couldn't keep up with them. We would gather up the windfalls and throw them into a pile to compost, but they fermented and some of the visiting birds were eating them, then getting drunk. We found ourselves having to protect them from the neighbour's cat, which was not good and we couldn't protect them once they'd left the garden. Luckily a lidded compost bin had been left with the house, so I set that up and moved them into it.
I also have a plum tree and used to have an apricot tree that I'd have the same issues with some years. If I got rid of the trees, then I could have got rid of the work dealing with all that extra fruit, but then I wouldn't have any to enjoy. So my solution since has been to share the good ones with friends and neighbours and prepare any that aren't so nice for freezing and cooking with at a later date.
Admittedly, it's time consuming, but there are multiple benefits. There's nothing better than ripe, flavoursome fruit straight from the tree and having it prepared in useable portions makes cooking easier further down the line. Also, sharing all of my abundances over the years has helped me to get to know the neighbours. A few of them even bring me their kitchen scraps and excess fruit and vegetables for our chickens.
These days we have things set up so that nothing produced in the garden goes to waste and there is no longer such a thing as excess or waste from it. I guess abundance can mean different things to different people. We all find our own ways of dealing with it and how we do that makes the difference between whether it becomes waste or a resource.