Shameless Plug: Community Supported Agriculture

I just sent in payment for this year’s CSA share. 

Our place in northwest Pennsylvania had a fairly extensive garden, and we grew vegetables by the bushel.  Every late summer weekend was devoted to canning, pickling, freezing, fermenting and otherwise preserving the bounty. 

It was a lot of work (in addition to both of us working full time and running a business, chasing two little kids, caring for the sheep and chickens and donkeys, plus the church job and free-lance writing I was shoe-horning in on the side) and I didn’t particularly care for it, but that’s what one gets for marrying a Midwestern farm boy.

When we moved to Maine we put in a nice big garden, plonked a bunch of seeds and six dozen tomato plants in the ground, and…

…nothing. 

We grew not much of anything at all. 

Acidic soil, maybe, or how we’re situated between Spruce and Ragged Mountains.  Some combination of factors throws things out of whack.  Tomatoes don’t ripen.  Peppers don’t set fruit.  Potatoes blight.  Eggplants mildew.  We can’t even grow zucchini, for chrissake. 

After a few years of various and sundry crop failures – including the Great Cannibalistic Tomato Hornworm Invasion of 2006 – we quit trying.  (In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that the end of our gardening career coincided with the purchase of a sailboat.  Purely coincidental.  Really.)

Last summer my friend and colleague M and I went in together on a CSA share and it was a fantastic experience.  More than 70 types of produce over the course of the season (not counting all the different varieties of lettuce and kale), in manageable amounts, and exquisitely fresh and delicious.  We barely entered the produce section of the grocery store for twenty wonderful weeks.

So my guilt and feelings of failure at not being able to grow my own vegetables are offset by knowing we’re supporting local agriculture, eating the best organic produce, and not consuming food miles.   For what we get, the cost is more than reasonable. 

Hope’s Edge Farm, run by Tom Griffin.  I will be rhapsodizing about Farmer Tom and his vegetables all summer, so I shall say no more about it at this time except please check it out. 

(He has no idea this blog exists and even if he did, I would refuse any compensation for promoting his farm other than perhaps an extra heirloom tomato or two.  Preferably those ugly splotchy sweet ones.)