CSAs I've known and loved, part two

No work in the yard today- it's raining! It's been a dry spring, and quite warm for the past week or so- we really needed some moisture. Not TOO much moisture, I hope, since I don't want a repeat of last April's basement flood, but enough to make the plants happy.

In the meantime, I'll finish telling you about my past CSA experience. After one year with the Rutgers student CSA farm, we moved again and had our son, and took a few years off from CSA. I thought that weekly trips to the farm and having to devise ways to use up all the produce might not be so enjoyable when I was pregnant and nauseated, or the following summer when we were living our lives entirely according to our infant son's schedule. But by 2007 I was ready for CSA again. And boy did we hit the jackpot this time. We joined the Honey Brook Organic Farm in Pennington, NJ. It's huge, it's organic, and the quality and yields last summer were just spectacular- so much so that they've been careful to warn us that last year was "atypically" abundant.

There are a lot of things I like about Honey Brook.

• First, the size of the farm means that they grow a huge variety of crops. I was thrilled that we received fennel, brussels sprouts and edamame along with the more traditional tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini.
• They grow fruit- amazing organic strawberries, a long-bearing crop of raspberries, and a variety of melons. Expect to hear a lot more about the strawberries and raspberries this summer- they're probably my favorite thing about the farm.
  
• They seem to be really good at figuring out how much of each crop to plant- they do plenty of the popular things like tomatoes, and less of things like, oh, mizuna and mustard greens that in my opinion, you really CAN have too much of. (Okra may be an exception- I think they grew WAY too much. I almost never saw people picking their allotted share of okra. I know I rarely did. It was scary and itchy among those rows of big old okra plants.)
• The quality of the produce is excellent. I've heard people complain about, and have experienced myself, plenty of organic produce that is ugly and misshapen and coated in dirt (organic dirt, but still). Not at Honey Brook. Their stuff is beautiful and delicious.

I think we were lucky to get a share in 2007- the farm has sold out earlier and earlier each year, and returning members get first shot at the shares each year. For the 2008 season, shares sold out in February- which is earlier than we joined last year. But since we were renewing members, we'd already sent in our check and secured our spot back in December- hooray!