Great tip for your summer berries!

My kids love fresh fruit. Berries of any sort, bananas, and pears are their top picks. I love that my kids raid the drawer of fruit before getting any kind of packaged snack from the cabinet.

Strawberries and blueberries are always on my grocery list. As long as they aren't insanely priced that week. This past week I hit the mother load. Our local Aldi had strawberries for $0.99 a carton and blueberries for $1.09 a carton. I piled as many cartons of each in my cart that looked the freshest. The kids were eager to get home and bust into the berries.

When we got home and unloaded the mother load of berries, I realized "I hope we can get through all these before they get fuzzy!" I really had never bought more than 2 cartons of something at a time, unless I planned to use them all right away. I stuck the berries in the fridge and hopped online to do some research on a natural safe way to disinfect them. I wanted the mold spores off the berries so they'd last longer.

And just what did I find? VINEGAR. Vinegar that sits in my cupboard all year long waiting to be used again to dye Easter eggs. Vinegar has been found to be a natural disinfectant. In fact, it can kill 82% of mold.

I slammed the laptop shut and dug out the vinegar from the back of the pantry. I grabbed a big bowl and poured as much water in it as I could, turns out that was 5 cups. I didn't want my fruit to taste like vinegar, so I figured I'd try a 10:1 ratio. So I did 1/2 a cup of white vinegar added to the water. I let the berries soak in the water for about 2-3 minutes, and then returned them to their plastic cartons. I ran some clean water over them before returning them to the fridge.

Now 4 1/2 days later my berries have NO signs of mold. They aren't all mushy and furry. By now they would have been hanging out in the bottom of my trash can. I am so excited that I can now buy berries in bulk for my kiddos to enjoy all week... and maybe a few days longer than that even. I will see how long it takes us to get through all this fruit. At the first sign of a furry berry, I will update to show just how much more life the vinegar rinse gave them.