Brief Adventure with a CSA

One of the new things we tried recently was a CSA. In case you don't know, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Our CSA website defined it as "a partnership between a farm and a community of subscribers which provides a direct link between the production and consumption of food. Members make a commitment to support the farm throughout the season. Members purchase a share of the harvest which is delivered to them weekly at a local drop location." Basically you pay up front for a local farm to grow food for you, then you pick up a box of produce every week at a specified location, or some of them will deliver to your door for an additional fee. You don't get to choose what is in the box, the give you what ever is ripe and in season. There are many advantages, some being: you know where the food came from, it is fresh (often picked that morning), you support local agriculture, and you get a good variety of in-season produce. If the farm has a good year then you benefit by getting more produce, however if it is a bad year then you may end up with less than you would normally get. CSAs may also offer different sizes of produce boxes so you can choose one based on how many are in your family or how often you cook. They also usually give you recipes that you can make based on what is in your box.

My main motivation, silly as it may sound, was that it forced me to buy a variety of vegetables that I may not have bought other wise and I then had to find something to do with them. The particular CSA we chose divided the year up in quarters and you paid per quarter. If you wanted to sign up later in quarter they would pro-rate the cost. I signed up at the end of the quarter, so we paid for four weeks worth of produce. Some CSAs also have "add-ons" or extra things you can pay for and get weekly with your produce like flowers, bread, fruit, honey, meat, etc. Ours offered bread from a local bakery so I signed up for four weeks of bread too.

In case you are interested, this is what we got in our produce box each week:

Week 1: Yellow squash, zucchini, potatoes, cucumbers, string beans, corn, basil, tomatoes, and garlic

Week 2: Beets, yellow squash, zucchini, potatoes, lemon cucumbers, string beans, cantaloupe, and cinnamon basil

Week 3: Yellow squash, red onions, lemon cucumbers, string beans, tomatoes, corn, and peaches

Week 4: String beans, cherry tomatoes, figs, eggplant, red bell peppers, basil, and potatoes

It was a real challenge for me to find stuff to do with our produce (tells you something about my cooking) and to do it before it went bad, and sadly we didn't end up throwing some stuff away because I didn't do something with it in time. I think my biggest problem was poor planning on my part. I typically plan my weekly menu to go from Sunday to Saturday and I do my shopping on Saturday. Our pick up day was on Tuesdays so this threw off my weekly menu and shopping, it was my bad for not adjusting. However, I will say that in those four weeks we ate more vegetables than we have our entire marriage (4 years) and we felt better too. We also tried several things that we had never tried like figs and eggplant. One of our favorite things to make was CSA pizza. On Friday or Saturday nights we would make a pizza out of things we had from our CSA. They were always pretty tasty.

Our last week of the CSA Ryan and I talked about the things we liked about a CSA and if we wanted to continue. We both really liked having a CSA and we felt healthier. However, we decided not sign up for the next quarter though mostly because we went way over on our grocery budget and while with better planning we might be able to fix that, there are some other things I would like to try, like farmers markets and maybe some grow boxes in our little yard. This week was our first week without it and I missed getting our "surprise box" on Tuesdays, it was something I looked forward to. We may very well go back to a CSA though, but I think I would switch to a different one. Our pick up site was about 20 minutes away on a side of town that we typically don't have a need to go, which was sometimes a pain and took a lot of gas. There were also some I found with more variety that I liked. All in all it was a really good experience and I would definitely recommend them to others.