Top Ten Reasons to Join a CSA Farm

LEF Strawberries on the Vine

LEF Strawberries in the Basket

Ideas Collected from CSA Subscribers

Springtime is the perfect season to join a CSA farm.  CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, is an arrangement where consumers subscribe to a local organic farm and receive a “farm share” of produce every week. You get a box of perfectly ripened local fruits and veggies straight from the fields, fresher and more flavorful that from any market. In turn, your CSA subscription gives the farmer resources to purchase seeds, soil amendments, and farm equipment, and assures him or her of recipients for the farm’s produce when crops are booming. Most CSA farms offer several box sizes and a choice of payment options. If you’re in the Santa Cruz/South Bay/Monterey area, I highly recommend Live Earth Farm, which has spaces for a few more subscribers this year. Our first boxes have included lettuce, cilantro, spinach and other greens, young carrots, beets, green garlic, and LEF’s legendary strawberries. I’m not exaggerating…you’ll not find any better strawberries anywhere. Folks from other US locations can find a farm on the CSA map provided by LocalHarvest.org.

Review: Organic Farming & Sustainable Agriculture Book

"Cultivating a Movement: An Oral History of the Organic Farming & Sustainable Agriculture on California’s Central Coast"

Fresh, Local, and Organic

We are blessed with a generous growing season around the CA Central Coast, as well as a wealth of progressive thinkers and activists. So it’s natural that the Santa Cruz area, like certain other areas in the US, became a hotbed for development of organic farming and sustainable agriculture. Since the 1960s, local interest in political activism, research, and education, as well as organic farming itself, has helped to make organic farming and sustainable production practical for farmers and appealing for consumers throughout the US.

"Cultivating a Movement" chronicles this process of popularizing organic and sustainable agriculture by interviewing contributors to the movement from many backgrounds and walks of life. This volume is excerpted from a ten-volume set of transcribed oral histories on organic and sustainable farming. In turn, these ten volumes are part of University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Library’s ambitious Regional History Project, in which librarians are interviewing hundreds of Central Coast area movers and shakers, recording and transcribing their stories.

Menu Planning: Questions, Questions, Questions

As I said in an earlier post, I am not an expert meal-planner…yet. In the past I’ve planned weekly meals with some success, but have abandoned the effort time and again. However, the pain of throwing out delicious veggies that have gone bad because they got buried in the refrigerator causes me to take up the effort again. Fellow CSA members, do you feel my pain?

This time, to start planning meals, I'll brainstorm by asking a series of questions about each veggie:

And Now for a Word from our CSA

LEF Tomatoes from the Web Store

I’ve had a couple of readers ask me what a CSA is. The acronym stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The idea is that you “subscribe” to an organic farm and receive fresh veggies and fruits every week. The farm provides you with a “share” of whatever is ripe and ready for harvest, and of it’s fresher than organic produce in the store. Most folks (including yours truly) think it’s tastier too.