For several years, we’ve gotten most of our produce through a CSA. I’ve gotten a bunch of questions about it, so I wanted to share my own experiences.
What is a CSA?
CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Many smart people have explained it better than I can, so I’ll keep this pretty simple. Food is super important to being alive. Farming is hard. I don’t want to be a farmer, but I do want to have good food. So I, as a member of the Community, can Support my local Agriculture by buying local food. It’s really hard to be a farmer, and it’s really risky. CSAs spread that risk to the whole community. We purchase a share/membership/subscription at the beginning of the season, paying in advance for a season’s worth of produce. Then, each week of the growing season, we get a share of the harvest. Simple, right?
Some tips on sharing:
A CSA can be a lot of produce if you’re not the sort of house that cooks with a lot of veggies right now. We’ve never gotten a share all by ourselves. We started off splitting a share among three households, with my grandparents and my mother. Then, we split a share with just my mom while we were living with my grandparents, and then we just split a share with my mom.
There’s a bunch of ways you can split a share, some better than others. Some people alternate who picks up the share each week. When we were splitting the share three ways, we all met up and would decide who’d get what. Here’s the problem with that method: we would divide up individual items, and nothing really got split evenly. For instance, Ben and I would end up with a grocery bag full of greens and two tiny potatoes. Nobody was happy with this arrangement. When we split the share just with my mom, the rule is you have to take *all* of an “item” (bunch of radishes, bag of spinach, the potatoes, etc). This has worked out really well for us. There are, of course, exceptions. At the height of radish season last year, we got five bunches of radishes each week. We’d usually split those up between households.
I Want Food Too! 