CSA Adventure 2009

If you are interested in joining a CSA now is the time to sign up. You can see my evaluation of our CSA experience here: All Good Things Must End.

What is a CSA? See Our Summer Experiment The CSA at Wild Onion Farms, is enrolling new participants. Last year we received a box of produce each week for about 17 weeks. This year Elizabeth is organizing things a little different. Instead of a box of produce each week we are free to pick out what we want from Elizabeth’s stall, the amount will be deducted from the prepaid share amount. There advantage to prepaying is we will receive a 10% bonus so $350 prepaid becomes $385 for the summer. All CSAs operate differently so check the rules before committing to one. Local Harvest is a good jumping off place for finding a CSA.

I know what most of our share money will be going to: Corn, lots of corn.

Anyone else what to share their CSA experiences?

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

CSA Adventures: Fuzzy Food

I was away 2 weekends while I was visiting family. My husband did the pick up. He wasn’t as diligent as I in storing the fresh picked vegetables. I am saddened to report there was some vegiside that occurred.

While I was gone, he discovered a liking for okra! Okra is one of those foods I have not previously encountered in the raw. I have had it bathed in stew and coated in battered and fried. Until we joined the Wild Onion CSA, I had never seen it in its natural state.

Okra is fuzzy. It looks like a tiny octagonal fuzzy genetically altered green zucchini. I can’t tell you what it tastes like because I do not consume fuzzy food. I peal peaches before eating them. While I was away, my husband hit allrecipes.com and found one for sautéed okra that he then made, ate and enjoyed.

Cut the tops off the okra. Heat way more oil than a health conscientious person should use, into a frying pan, sauté okra for a few minutes. Drain on paper towels; add salt, pepper and hot red pepper flakes to taste. Enjoy.

We have been receiving a bevy of multi colored peppers. The girls have taken to eating them raw. Since colored peppers are pricy, I only buy them to use in a specific recipe. There were never enough around just to eat like you would an apple or a carrot. We don’t wax poetic about them like we did the cherry tomatoes from earlier this summer but having extra colored peppers around has been a treat.

Tropical Storm Hanna was threatening our area with rain and high winds. We could use the rain, it’s the winds we can do without. The farmers market was closed this past weekend. The few sellers that showed did a bang up business but we were not able to pick up this week’s box. There were supposed to be butter beans in the box.

What exactly is a butter bean?