A Trip to the Amish

Last week Kelli and I hopped into the truck and drove to the Amish settlement south of there near Oelwein, Iowa to meet up with Kayla.  Kayla is a school teacher in Marion and her days of being free from word were quickly slipping away.  One thing on her summer want list was to go to one of the Amish produce auctions.  It sounded fun so off we went.

Please note that people who are Amish prefer to not have their photo taken so in respect of that, we took few photos and not that depicted them.

The auction was fun.  Many of the local Amish grow gardens specifically for the produce auctions so there is a lot there.  Kayla bought a lot of 7 half bushel boxes of cucumbers for pickling for only $2 a box…CHEAP…and makes it hardly worth growing a garden.  We bought onions, sweet corn and tomatoes too.  I did really good to keep my hand down and not bidding.  I don’t have time to preserve anything and I don’t want to move a bunch of full canning jars!!

The back of Kayla’s car was filled with goodies…the pretty mums, just $6 per plant.

I snapped a picture of the girls sitting outside of the bulk foods store on the porch swing.  They had their porch swing mounted with huge springs at the top.  Once at the new house we’ll have our porch swing back and I want Hubby to put the springs on our set up.

Just before I snapped the photo Kayla was trying to convince Kelli to eat sun dried tomatoes….Kelli wouldn’t of course.

From there it was a trip to the Bent and Dent.  It’s a store with dented groceries.  I go every time we are passing through.  If a box of cans gets rejected at the factor because a couple of cans in the box are dented it makes it’s was to stores like this that resell the cans.

I love it.  I buy most all of my canned goods here.  It’s very unpredictable what you’ll find.  It’s very common to find refried beans, cake mixes, cereal, hamburger helper, dog food, and popcorn.  It’s always an interesting trip and the groceries and commonly half to 3/4 the price you’d pay for it at a regular grocery store.  If you have to have the perfect brand of something..this isn’t a store for you but if you don’t care if your ketchup is Heinz or Hunts or the generic….you’d love this.

All in all it was a fun day..It’s nice getting a chance to spend time with the girls….and a visit to the Amish is much more like our kind of shopping.