Box of Veggies

Local farm, Gathering Together Farms has a program they call Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). The way it works is, the subscribers pay a one-time fee up front in March, and for 22 weeks the farmers give us a box of whatever veggies they happen to harvest that week. The benefit to them is that they don't have to come up with the start up cash, and they don't risk losing big if uncooperative weather damages their harvest. The benefit to the subscriber is that we get a big box of fresh tasty vegetables every week without having to get dirt under our fingernails, plus we stand to benefit if they are lucky enough to have a bumper crop.


We signed up for the program this year, and I picked up the first box of the season this Saturday. We got Kohlrabi, Bok Choy, Chard, Rhubarb, a couple carrots and a cucumber. We are splitting the box with some friends of ours and they got the lettuce (one red-leaf, one green), onions (one of them might have been a leek), purple potatoes, carrots and a cucumber. After we split it up I realized that we got all the "cool" vegetables and they got all the "ordinary" vegetables (that wasn't intentional, Eric and Allison, we will have to work out a fairer way of splitting this up in the future).

This program helps me accomplish two of my summer resolutions: to eat more fresh produce, and to start planning my meals for the week (including bringing lunch to work instead of eating out). Maybe I'll copy my sister and start posting my weekly meal plan on my blog.