To supplement the fresh produce that we grow in our yard, we receive CSA boxes each week. This is such a wonderful opportunity that I wanted to share the concept and possibility. While we have farmers' markets - and they are terrific - there is another way to become veggie-educated and nourished with newly-picked from the earth produce.This summer my family and I have tried produce we've never encountered before in its freshest form. Beets (Mom always pickled them and I don't like all the vinegar), Swiss Chard (just plain scared me!), turnips (good raw in salads - who knew?), pac choi (you've read my soup post, right?), and fennel. What a blast! One of the biggest perks about CSA boxes over the farmers' market for us is that we are given food we may not have purchased at the market, encouraging these new encounters.
I wrote a little about CSA boxes on my other blog here.
I hope you'll read the post and let me know what you think. It's a good way to support local farms and to eat food that satisfies our bodies rather than eat food from heaven knows where that can potentially make us quite sick. It's a good idea to at least think about what we chew and swallow, no?
(I'm going to go make a salad. All this veggie talk has made me ready for supper!)
3 comments:
Oh My! I'm having CSA Envy! I've never heard of CSA and am very intrigued.
You have such a big garden that you might not even need CSA boxes, G. But I'm glad I've intrigued you. Options are good things, right?
These have been fairly common here for some time due to the smaller size of most farms. The 'general crop' folks were having it hard and this was a good fit with the city folks. The larger towns/cities, what there are, also have almost all introduced some form of community gardening where the folks grow the food themselves on city donated & monitored plots closer to where they live.
Some CSA groups pick up the food from the farms for delivery to a pick-up spot in the urban areas while others are designed to get the city folk onto the farms for a few hours where they pitch in with the gardening chores. It lowers the costs and gives the farmers some relief while teaching about the growing of crops.
I fear that style may draw to a close unless fuel costs come down though.
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