Many farms offer produce subscriptions, where buyers receive a weekly or monthly basket of produce, flowers, fruits, eggs, milk, meats, or any sort of different farm products.
A CSA, (for Community Supported Agriculture) is a way for the food buying public to create a relationship with a farm and to receive a weekly basket of produce. By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become "members" (or "shareholders," or "subscribers") of the CSA. Most CSA farmers prefer that members pay for the season up-front, but some farmers will accept weekly or monthly payments. Some CSAs also require that members work a small number of hours on the farm during the growing season.
A CSA season typically runs from late spring through early fall. The number of CSAs in the United States was estimated at 50 in 1990, and has since grown to over 2000. [read more here: http://www.localharvest.org/csa.jsp ]
It is a way for us to help the community - by keeping the land a farm instead a subdivision. It is also a way for us to eat locally grown food - at a time when Stop and Shop, Costco, Publix, etc bring in food from all over the world so that we can have tomatoes, strawberries, plums, etc all year long.
Except, the tomatoes you buy at the store, they don't SMELL like tomatoes, and they taste like tomatoes from a store. We've gotten a bit used to the way that supermarket veggies and fruits taste like, and thats what we expect, and now even, to a point, enjoy.
But if you've ever had a garden, the smell of a tomato is a beautiful thing. In fact, just rubbing the leaves of a tomato plant will intoxicate you, and leave you wanting more. Handle tomatoes at a supermarket, and your hands smell like your hands.
I digress.
Since we are novices at this, we are sharing this winter share with friends. We've split the cost down the middle, and will split the distribution down the middle, or roughly. They don't like brussel sprouts, so we will take those, but they will take our cabage, etc etc.
Since this is my first time picking up and enjoying a distribution, I'm really looking forward to driving over to the farm for our 10:30am pickup.
From the Belmont CSA blog [ http://belmontcsa.blogspot.com/ ]
How many people will one Winter Share feed? How much produce is in one Winter Share? How long will one monthly distribution of vegetables last? Each monthly distribution contains between 35 and 45 pounds of produce. We hope that the October share will contain an additional ten pounds of storage apples. In my home, it barely feeds two adults for a month. Of course, we cook a lot, eat most of our meals at home, and have the neighbors (two adults and two vegetable loving kids) over for a weekly shared meal. This year we've decided to do our best to eat locally-grown produce all winter. We might need two Winter Shares.
Will one Winter Share be enough for your household or will it be too much? Here's some information that might help you answer the question for yourself.
The monthly distributions will weigh approximately 35 to 45 pounds. If your goal is to completely eat all the food in each distribution within a month, that's about 10 pounds of produce per week. That's a good amount of food for a couple. Much of the produce stores well - winter squash, potatoes, onions, shallots, carrots, parsnips, celeriac, beets can last months if stored at the right temperature and humidity. Shareholders often make the produce last even longer by cooking and freezing it (winter squash soup, potato and leek soup, or my favorite, turnip, leek and sweet potato soup, for example), pickling it (beets), fermenting it (cabbage). Other shareholders use the share up more quickly by juicing some of the produce (carrots, beets, apples) and using it to feed family and friends at holiday meals/parties.
And apparently this is a multi-farm winter share, so we are benefiting from a few farms' worth of winter crops.
Will report back later with what we got!
No comments:
Post a Comment