our farm share

 This has been our second year subscribing to a weekly bag of produce from a local farm. This is called a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) or farm share, if you're not familiar with it. Ours runs for 26 weeks from May through November, and has been a great experience. This year has been a much fuller experience than before, since last summer I was in my first trimester of pregnancy with Gavriel. Salad did NOT sound good, and since CSAs are notorious for giving you a lot of greens, it wasn't a good match! I let a few bags of things go to waste because I didn't feel like cooking or eating them, or they were new to me and I wasn't sure what to do. This year, I think we've stayed on top of almost everything!
   The above picture was from three weeks ago, and we received kale, basil, green peppers, onions, garlic, summer squash, potatoes, tomatoes, and winter squash. This is a pretty typical amount, although sometimes early spring looks a little more sparse and we've also had some hugely generous bumper weeks too. The produce itself varies by what's in season, obviously, so you have a vague idea but never know exactly what's going to come!
  I do still buy produce at the grocery store in addition - usually fruit and a bag of onions every week, plus a few other things to round out our vegetables for the week. Ours is a 'mini share,' but I'm not sure if I'd use up more of these same vegetables, even though we eat more than we get. I try to go grocery shopping the day after the CSA comes so that I know what to buy and how to work it into my meal plan.
You can search on www.localharvest.org for CSAs in your area, which is how I found ours, Waterbear Organic Farm. Sometimes farms that are not certified organic have better prices, but that wasn't the case here. I really don't care about the certification as long as you can ask questions about their growing practices!

[Here's a giant clove of garlic! We've gotten several heads like this and the cloves can be two inches across.] 

Have you ever been a part of a CSA? Does it sound fun to you?