CSA Adventure: All Good Things Must End

Elizabeth at Wild Onion Farms has ended the CSA a few weeks early. To much rain (!), foliage diseases have lead to a loss of crops. Gas price have increased production cost. It was with some sadness my husband picked up our last CSA box for the season.

Time to evaluate our adventure:

The Good:

• Hands down the quality and taste of the produce we received thought the CSA was better than anything we could buy at the grocery store.
• We enjoyed the variety of the produce. We would have never tried okra or blackberries or eggplant
• If you don’t know what to do with a particular vegetable, try sauteing it in a little olive oil, with salt, pepper and a seasoning or roasting it.
• Farm fresh cherry tomatoes and corn are sublime.
• Delivery to our local farmer’s market made pick up convenient.
  

The Less Good:

• We did have to supplement with produce and fruit from the grocery store most weeks. There wasn’t enough fruit for the week for my family. Lettuce, tomatoes, and pepper don’t grow at the same time especially in the early part of the season so if you want tomatoes in your salad you have to supplement what you receive from the CSA.
• The season ended 2 weeks early. At $475 prepaided, divided by 19 weeks of produce the cost was $25 per week during the growing season.
  

The Bad:

• I could never get the grit out of the greens no matter how much I washed them
• The salad greens tasted bitter to me all season. Some family members enjoyed the bitter taste when dressed with an acidic salad dressing; some of us just didn’t like the salad greens at all.
• There were vegetables available at her produce stand that we didn’t receive in our boxes. Sometimes, I experienced vegetable envy.
  

The Unexpected:

• It was fun to sever a variety of colorful vegetables at dinner
• The kids, even the non-veggie eaters ate more vegetables
• At first the kids wouldn’t eat the strawberries and carrots because they looked “weird”
• Farm fresh corn and cherry tomatoes are sublime (I can’t mention that enough).
  

Will we join again next year? I don’t know. If we don’t join the CSA, I will allocate part of our weekly grocery budget to purchases made at the farmers market. Even of we forgo the convenience of being members in a CSA, we are not going to forgo the pleasures of farm fresh produce.

Till next year… Bon Appetit

Follow the adventure:

Lettuce Begin

What Dill I Do

I Say Tomato

Now For the Nitty

We’ve Been Squashed

I Need To Score Some More Corn

Life Is the Berries

Orange is the New Green

Vegetable Rant

Fuzzy Food

Comments

[Solomon]

My sister has a veg box, and we often get stuff in it that we don't know what to do with. We got a Squash a couple of weeks ago. So I gave it to the dog to play with.