Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

David and I have been CSA members for a year and a half now. CSA stands for community supported agriculture, and as a CSA member farmers more or less deliver you a regular supply of fresh, local foods. We have been CSA members year round - in the winter we received a supply of root vegetables once a month, and in the summer we received seasonal veggies once a week. Additionally, we have been participating in meat, poultry, and egg shares so we also receive various cuts of beef, pork, whole chickens, and fresh eggs once a month. This vastly reduces our trips to the grocery store and we have been really impressed with the quality of the foods we have received. Basically, we are now spoiled by garden vegetables. Our idea of a delicious dinner of late has included a huge salad with just lettuce tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Incredibly simple, but the lettuce is just. that. good. Mmmmm. We have also learned to eat many new foods that we previously would have turned our noses up at. David will tolerate kale, swiss chard, and collard greens now and I have come to love beets. Prior to becoming CSA members neither one of us had cooked a whole chicken -- we unintentionally cooked the first chicken upside down.

For the first year and a half we were CSA members with Groundworks Farm, which was operated out of Vermont and had Cambridge deliveries. We LOVED this CSA and felt it was really great value. Each week we would go to the pick up location and select our allocation of vegetables from boxes and sacks. Once a month we would delve into their chest freezers and select meat based on a point system (e.g., hamburger was 1 point, a steak was 2-5 points). Groundworks Farm also supplied canned goods like pickles and salsa for our winter pickups. Groundworks Farm has recently moved to Maryland and so we are sadly no longer CSA members. While in Vermont they were leasing their farm, and they finally found a farm to buy this past winter in the D.C. area. Our only complaint with Groundworks Farm is that they don't offer half shares, so if you are a family of two like us you really need to find someone to share with. Who we shared with varied - first a friend, then my mother, and finally another member that Groundworks Farm hooked us up with. If anyone lives within their delivery range, we HIGHLY recommend considering one or more of their share options. Here is a link to their website: http://www.groundworksfarm.com

After saying goodbye to Margaret and Kevin at Groundworks Farm, we looked for other CSAs delivering to our area that contained winter, meat, poultry, egg, and veggies - basically we wanted the same "whole share" option we had had with Groundworks Farm. The closest thing we found was John Crow Farm, which had everything but the winter share.

We decided that was an OK sacrifice to make and if we really wanted to we could try canning or freezing some of the veggies from the summer share. So far we have been very happy with the veggies we are getting from them and think they taste delicious and are a good value (we have had three weeks of pickup). We have only had one meat/poultry pickup and have been less impressed with this option. The meat tastes great and is on par with what we received from Groundworks Farm, but the price is significantly higher. We have signed up for a six month share, but expect we will not continue this share going forward. For now though we'll just enjoy our goodies! Here is a link to John Crow Farm in case anyone is looking for a great veggie CSA in our area: http://www.johncrowfarm.com/

And finally, a couple of pictures from this week's goodies. The vegetables come in a veggie box. This week we got fennel, collard greens, swiss chard, kale, beets+beet greens, and two kinds of lettuce.

And strawberries!!! They were delicious. I didn't think to take a picture until we had already consumed most of them, so this is a picture of what remained.