Farm Share ~ Community Sponsored Agriculture Farm

by Vicki Borah Bloom

"Time to get the vegetables!" 

Thursday afternoon. It's the usual routine. I take Rhys out of the car, still groggy from a late afternoon nap, and put him in the big stroller, the one with the basket under the seat. “Time to get the vegetables!”, I sing to him as we climb up the hill to a small barn next to a suburban house. Some people would have used this space to park their cars, but there's no car in there – just crates of produce, picked that morning at an organic farm not too far away.

Our family belongs to a CSA, a community-sponsored agriculture farm.

The concept is simple. People pay a flat fee at the beginning of the planting season for a "share" of the farm's production. Each week during the harvest season, each member family gets a percentage of whatever's been harvested. The farmers don't have to spend time doing things like marketing during the time when they could be out making things grow. They also get the option of trying out new varieties, even if they aren't positive how well they might do.

Raising children to keep in touch with the rhythms of the land. 

The members get fresh organic produce every week, just the things that the Earth is serving up right then. If it's a good year for tomatoes, we eat a lot of tomatoes. If the weather's not been right for broccoli growing, we don't get much broccoli, and have to eat extra sweet corn instead. What a way to keep in tune with the local rhythms of the land, even here in the suburbs! We're eating strawberries and spinach in June, and peaches and peppers in August, because that's when they grow. The share changes as the summer rolls along into fall. The spinach will come back again for a bit while the weather cools, and we'll be eating apples, pumpkins, and potatoes as the days grow shorter.

It's also a great opportunity to eat some things we might not usually choose. We've eaten a lot of chard this season, more than I'd ever choose myself at the store. Tokyo Bekana's a green I don't think I'd ever even heard of before. I never buy beets, because I'm allergic to them, so when they show up in the share, they're my husband's special treat. There are things you really can only get if you know a farmer, like garlic scapes, the extra shoots of garlic that need to be thinned to keep the main bulb growing. And who knew how much a baby would love buttered kohlrabi?

The beginning of the season this year was also just about the beginning of my son's experience with eating solids. There wasn't a lot of food in the share yet in early June, and there wasn't a lot he could eat yet, but I tried to match it up as best I could. "Here, we can puree this one for you!", I crooned to my half awake seven-month old, holding up the season's first tiny zucchini.

Three months later, it's more of an exciting visit for him. It's the height of the harvest season, and he's learned to feed himself nearly everything we're getting in our share. I look at the sign on the wall telling us what we should take from the crates, and load it into my bags, showing each piece to the baby. "One..two..three...four...five...six ears of sweet corn!" I count as I put them in the bag. It's sweet enough to eat raw. He babbles excitedly as he recognizes a cantaloupe in my hand. I count two kinds of peppers and four different kinds of tomatoes. Salsa time! Rhys chews tentatively on the top of a leek that he can barely lift that I've placed in his lap, making a face but going back for a second try. There are mesclun greens, onions, garlic, and green beans. There are tiny Seckel pears. There are amazing carrots a foot and a half long and over an inch in diameter, and I feel confident that I don't have to worry about nitrates, even if I don't peel them. There are lots of herbs, basil and dill and parsley and cilantro, for which the list writer trusts us to use our judgment on exactly how much a "small handful" is. By the time we're done, Rhys has flirted with at least two other people picking up their shares, the stroller's overloaded, and I'm designing dinner in my head and sneaking a bite out of a pear as I load vegetables and baby back into the car

My son has grown with the season, and this weekly routine serves as a little benchmark for me of how much he's changing. He's making his tiny body strong with this food, and learning the joy of eating with the best ingredients possible. It might be next year before my son really understands that the objects I'm picking up are the food he's eating later in the week, and a few years yet before he's helping out in the kitchen. This year, he's learning something about how we fit in with the rest of the living world. If he grows up ready to try new things, ready to make opportunity spring from the materials at hand, and ready to live with the rhythms of the world around him, I'll have to give a little bit of the credit to some vegetables.