This year, my husband and I set an ambitious goal: no supermarket veggies. We don’t live in a rural area. We don’t even have space for our own vegetable garden, and what space we do have is probably contaminated by lead paint and other urban pollutants. What we do have is a CSA membership (and 6 years of experience) and a half dozen farmers’ markets within easy reach.
CSA stands for “community supported agriculture” or “consumer subscription agriculture,” depending who you ask. We pay a lump sum to our farmer in January, and he uses it to buy whatever he needs for the coming year. Then, once a week all summer, he drives from his farm into our neighborhood and we, along with all his other “shareholders” go meet the truck and get whatever veggies are ready that week. Our farmer strives for variety. That means we’ve received lots of vegetables that were completely unfamiliar to us, but we’ve now had four years in which to learn how to prepare them.
Our CSA doesn’t provide everything, and certainly doesn’t provide as much as we would like of our favorites. When we want something specific, we head to a farmers’ market. We also go to our most local farmers’ market because it’s a nice walk and we like the social aspect – we always run into friends there.
The CSA and farmers markets all run the same season: June through October. So what about the rest of the year? Simple. Plan ahead. Although we mostly plan to freeze vegetables for the winter, we invested in a copy of Putting Food By to make sure we do it right and to keep other options open.
This blog is part a vegetable logbook for me, and part (I hope) an inspiration to you as you try to support your health and your local economy by buying produce directly from your local farmers.
Tags: CSA
January 22, 2009 at 7:45 pm |
Edit: Originally said we had 4 years of experience. We actually had 6 years of experience with our CSA, and my husband had a a couple of years experience with a different CSA before we were a couple.
January 22, 2009 at 8:42 pm |
[...] Next year we’ll be better about buying things at the farmers market to supplement our CSA share. In retrospect, we neglected to realize that with more vegetables around (going from a small share to a large) we would eat more vegetables. Plus we were trying to eat for 12 months on 5 months’ deliveries of vegetables, so even getting twice as many vegetables as we were eating wouldn’t have been enough. (For a peek back at what we were thinking, check out my very first blog post: Goal: No Supermarket Veggies.) [...]
May 26, 2009 at 10:25 pm |
[...] the need to join a winter CSA, or buy the occasional grocery store tomato sauce or potatoes. (Flashback to my first post shows what I thought we were getting ourselves [...]