For the last two years, we’ve participated in Zephyr Farm’s CSA. If you’re not familiar with a CSA, it stands for “Community Supported Agriculture” and is basically a vegetable subscription. Ours started mid-June and ran through the end of October.
Pickups from the beginning of the season (6/22/2010) and end of the season (9.15.09)
I looked forward to my Tuesday pickups, when I’d walk down the street with my IKEA bag and come back with an Iron Chef-like challenge to imagine a week of dishes with the bag’s contents. Every second week, we got the most delicious assortment of multi-colored eggs.
This year, we won’t be doing the CSA. We moved to a new neighborhood, and since J works late and I take the bus, it would be very hard for us to pick up our weekly allotment. Instead, we’ll be putting aside money to spend at the Saturday farmers’ market, which is luckily in walking distance. I’ll miss it – maybe one day we’ll be able to join again.
You know, you’ve hit the same sort of issue we did. There’s unfortunately only so much produce our household can consume (and our CSA, like yours, requires a lot of dedication and creativity to use up!), so one of the down sides of being active in a CSA (as well as growing a not-insignificant amount of produce ourselves) is that I don’t have as much money (or refrigerator space) to spend on the other nice farmers down at the farmers market. I always feel good that I’m in a CSA, but bad that some of the other farmers, to whom I had been a good and reliable customer, aren’t getting as much of my business…
Then again, my CSA has hard cider, so I don’t feel that bad…