CSAs I've known and loved (or not loved)- part one

I've belonged to several CSA farms over the years. The first one, in Ithaca, provided me with more mizuna, dandelion greens and mustard greens than I could ever desire, but little else. My desire for bitter greens is somewhat low to begin with, so this was not the best CSA experience for me. Things looked up briefly when the farmers decided to try their hand at beekeeping. They ordered a few hives and set them up at the farm... but a few weeks later, the queen bees decided they did not care for their new home and flew off, taking the entire hives with them. So much for the promises of delicious raw honey! To be fair, it was their first year of CSA farming and I've heard that the yields and variety have improved considerably since.

I tried again a few years later, with a different farm in Ithaca. This one was cheaper, and I could still only afford a "working" share- basically a discounted price in return for putting in a specified number of work hours over the course of the summer. The "work" mostly involved weeding. Early in the season I found myself lying on my belly in the dirt, reaching into a hoop house with the sides rolled up only a foot or so, to pull weeds from between the baby spinach plants. It was interesting how owning a share of the farm yield affected my work ethic. I've never weeded with such gusto- by golly, that was MY spinach being choked out by weeds and I was going to rescue it. Another day my task was to pick tomato worms from the plants. And on a fall day I harvested pumpkins, learning to cut the stem in just the right place so that the pumpkin would have an attractive "handle." I also learned (the hard way) that it is a handle in name only- if you lift it by the stem, the weight of the pumpkin will cause the stem to just break off in your hand. I belonged to this one for two years. The first year, the summer was hot and dry and the tomatoes, eggplants and peppers were abundant. The second year had a lot of wet, cool weather and we got tons of greens in the spring and fall, but the summer crops were pretty miserable. A good lesson in how CSA involves sharing in both the rewards and risks of farming!

When we moved to New Brunswick, I convinced Jason to join a CSA through Rutgers that is run entirely by students, the Cook Student Organic Farm. The students did a fantastic job and this farm offered more variety and better quality than the two I'd been a member of in Ithaca. Tomatoes galore, all kinds of herbs, potatoes and onions and squash, and even melons! My favorite day was toward the end of the season when a storm with hurricane-force winds was predicted, and we were told we could go to the fields and pick all the tomatoes and basil we could carry so it wouldn't go to waste. That day provided us with a winter's worth of pesto for the freezer!

Stay tuned for part two!