All the fresh veggies you can eat, without the work
Published Monday November 24th, 2008
Food Saint John area households pay ahead for a share of organic farm's harvest
Every Wednesday evening for 20 weeks starting in early July and ending in mid-November, a brimming basket (well, reusable plastic bag) of organic local vegetables arrived on the doorstep.
It looked like a gift from the produce fairy, the top of the bag overflowing with a feathery plume of carrot tops or the soft stems of green onions. There is no produce fairy, of course, but there is Jodi and Andrew Giberson, the husband-and-wife team behind Chestnut Acres, an organic farm on the Kingston Peninsula, with two-acres of garden, another two acres of wild blueberry fields and a 2,000-square-foot greenhouse.
This spring, the entrepreneurial growers became the first farmers in the Saint John area to offer Community Supported Agriculture. We were lucky to be among the 20 households to buy a share in their harvest. For about $25 a week, including delivery, we enjoyed the spoils of their bounty.
The CSA program, which is offered by organic growers across North America, has subscribers buy a share of the season's worth of veggies - rain or shine, bumper crop or bust. The farmers get the money at the beginning of the season, using it to pay for seeds, tools and other expenses.
For anyone who loves the idea of gardening but hates how time-consuming and dirty it is, the CSA program is a great substitute. Ditto for urbanites who don't have a yard or those who want to support local farmers who are growing good quality organic food.
There are lots of people who want a piece of the produce: Jodi says they already have 20 families on a waiting list for next year.
Besides writing a cheque at the beginning of the season and finding inventive ways to prepare the cornucopia of vegetables delivered each week, we had farm-fresh veggies with no effort.
Even though I didn't sink my fingers in the soil, pick weeds or worry about potato beetles all summer long, I felt a connection to the growing season in a way the produce section of the grocery store could never inspire.
In the spring, the bag was light and very green, the textures and shapes of different edible leaves forming the bulk of the first few deliveries.
The bag grew heavier with each passing week as the early summer's bounty of greens gave way to later harvests, such as root vegetables and several varieties of squash. The produce was picture-perfect, almost unbelievably vibrant in colour. The palette shifted from early summer's green hues to include the sunshine yellow of patty-pan squash, the deep purple of baby beets, the vibrant orange of carrots that are so much sweeter than their grocery-store counterparts.
The carrots, the size of my pinky one week, were thumb-thick the following. The beet greens we enjoyed early in July came with tiny beets attached the next week and, eventually, just the beets themselves were part of the weekly delivery. A small bag of the season's first new potatoes in July had swelled to a heavy sack of heftier spuds by August.
The element of surprise is a delicious (pardon the pun) part of the program, as the delivery varies from week to week, following the vagaries of weather and the growing cycle.
Along with old standbys such as turnips, snow peas and green beans, we discovered a number of new vegetables including garlic scapes, mizuna (a feathery green) and, my new favourite, tatsoi, a deep dark green that has the iron tang of spinach with a bok choi-esque texture and appearance.
We learned some new recipes as we tried to figure out ways to consume these unfamiliar foods although, in truth, the less we fussed over preparation, the more delicious they seemed to taste. New potatoes don't need any fancier treatment than a roast on the barbecue or quick boil on the stove. A little fresh pepper and butter and they are perfect. Greens steamed and sautéed with olive oil and garlic are divine.
The weekly delivery became the axis around which the rest of the grocery list revolved. It changed how we ate and dictated, in part, the other groceries we bought. Vegetables moved from side-dish status to the main event, in part because of their abundance - our fridge and counter looked like a photo shoot for the Canada Food Guide - but also because many organic crops don't have the kind of shelf-life genetically modified vegetables from factory farms do.
We felt heartsick at anything we didn't get to in time, that ended up in the compost bin. Our waste felt like a kind of insult to Jodi and Andrew's labour.
By Thanksgiving, the bags were growing so heavy, so full, I was beginning to feel anxious about the quantity of food and our ability to consume it. Luckily, many late-season crops are built to last, so the butternut and spaghetti squashes, the turnips and potatoes, went into cold storage.
Every time I pull out a squash for a winter meal, I'll think of where it came from, and of the people who grew it and delivered it to me.
Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal.
Disabled
Search Articles
More CE Network Sites & Partners:
