Top 10 Reasons to Join a CSA!

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Previously we shared why we as farmers love growing for our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) members, but this week we wanted to share why we think CSA is a great option to try as a customer. CSA has a lot of advantages for members, including some that overlap with the reasons we love CSA as farmers:

1. Freshness, Quality, and Flavor:

A typical week's share for early summer...

CSAs generally have some of the freshest food around! We grow a mix of different crops and varieties, often for their great flavors. Most vegetables are harvested the morning of the CSA pickup, and washed and chilled until it's time to pack and send the boxes of veggies out into the world. Because of this super-short supply chain, CSA farmers are able to grow varieties for things like taste rather than how they hold up through shipping out to stores.

2. Great Variety and Mix of Produce

One of our main focuses is to make sure each week's shares have a good mix of different standard crops (like  salad greens, cooking greens, root crops, and "fruit" vegetables) that are easy to handle and use. We also focus on adding some variety and a fun or particularly interesting item each week so folks can try new things, without it being overwhelming.

3. It's the next best thing to having a garden

If you can't have your own garden because of your space, work, or vicious deer assaults to defenseless backyard vegetables, CSA (especially if you get a chance to come visit the U-Pick garden) is the next best thing. We also welcome volunteers if you want to spend an hour or two in the fields!

4. It's a fun summer adventure/ritual

Belly Rubs!!!

Two things that we love to hear from members is how opening your weekly share becomes like a present of food, and how nice it is to visit the farm and relax in the U-Pick flower garden at the end of the week. Our farm is open Friday and Saturdays during the season to CSA members (and other times by appointment) and it's a nice chance to see how small scale farming works in the northeast, wander the fields, or visit the pigs and chickens. We want the CSA to be a fun place for you, with an interesting and fun mix of food to inspire your meals!

5. Kids have fun!

Along the same note, if you have kids or grand-kids (or nieces and nephews), CSA is a great way for them to learn about food and vegetables and farming. Most of the time, kids love getting to see (and help harvest if you visit the U-Pick) where their veggies come from, and hopefully it inspires them to eat more produce! We also notice that fresher, local vegetables taste a LOT sweeter, which is generally a selling point for to get kids to eat them. We have pigs and chickens hanging around the farm all summer, which is fun for children to get to see them grow.

6. Discover Eating with the Seasons

Farmer melon taste testing in the field!

One of the fun things with CSA is that you get the opportunity to explore and learn about what's best to eat when. Grocery stores are fine since you can find the same things all year long, but with a CSA you really get the chance to see how extra-amazing food tastes when it's the precisely prime season. Nothing is as good as sugar snap peas right off the vine (late June/early July), the intense flavor of a ripe heirloom tomato (August), or the unbelievably sweet post-frost carrots of fall (October)!

7. Get to Know Your Farm and Your Farmers

While we love the opportunity to meet our CSA members and learn what you want us to grow for you, we also hope that you feel free to take the opportunity to visit the farm if you like and get to know us! Like many CSAs, we have a weekly newsletter to share recipes and cooking ideas, as well as the ups and downs of the growing season. Our CSA members are the cornerstone of our farm--we really appreciate your support and enjoy sharing our working family farm with you. We have U-Pick hours on Fridays and Saturdays from July through October and welcome folks to walk around and check the fields out! 

It's also our members' CSA as well, so we really like to hear member feedback. We definitely add and subtract crops each year due to member input, and we hope that thinking about how your CSA can best serve your needs is fun for you!

8. Good Value for Farmers and Members

Yummy fall share...

CSAs are also a good value for members. When you join the CSA you become in a sense a shareholder in the farm for the growing season. We appreciate your support and strive to give you a good return on your investment. Typically (in good and average years), shareholders receive 10 to 15% more vegetables than you pay for over the course of the season. And shareholders also receive a 10% discount on your vegetable purchases at the farmers markets as well.

9. Eat Healthier and Learn about Preparing Vegetables

We got into farming because we like to eat, and we like to share our love of food with you. In the weekly newsletter we share ideas on how to prepare and enjoy that week's share, and we love when members share their favorite recipes with us. As farmers, our summertime can get pretty crazy, so we focus a lot on meals that are easy and quick to prepare and can be simple for folks and families also caught in the summertime rush.

Having all the fresh CSA vegetables around can also be a great inspiration to cook more and push a little outside your comfort zone. We have had a number of members over the years initially join because the commitment to a share would be a good impetus to cook more and eat healthier, and we love hearing feedback that it works! (The small share is a good size if you want to start challenging yourself to use more vegetables at home--at 5 to 7 items a week, it isn't too overwhelming to take on a veggie item a day!)

10. Good for the Community and Environment

CSAs by their nature are very tied with the local environment and community. We look at building our CSA and our farm as a long term commitment to the region. We want to grow and adapt with our members to provide the crops that you want, and we want to work with our land to improve it every season so that each year brings a better harvest and a healthier ecosystem. We do this by using a range of organic farming practices, including crop rotation, cover cropping, encouraging good bugs, and a whole lot more (please ask us anytime about how we farm!). We also are committed to the local community and want to make sure that everyone in our community can afford local, healthy food (ask us about our flexible payment plans). When you join a CSA as a shareholder, you help farms build their community and improve their ecosystems--thank you!

We hope you consider trying out a CSA this season! Learn more about Hartwood Farm CSA at the links above!

Carrots: Arlo's Favorite Vegetable!

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Arlo wanted to make sure we talk about his favorite crop early in the blog, since he's working so hard this winter to rout the rabbits out of next year's carrot field. Carrots are by far the favorite vegetable of all species at Hartwood Farm, to the point where we have to supervise the dog to make sure he doesn't harvest them on his own! 

Unfortunately, carrots can be one of the more challenging crops to grow (as you may have learned if you grow them at home)! They are picky in what soil and weather conditions they thrive in. It takes ages for the seed to germinate (2 to 3 weeks) so the weeds can easily get ahead of them. And, in years like the last three, pounding May and June rains can compact the soil surface to further inhibit seed germination (or wash those tiny seeds away). 

We plan for our carrot planting a year in advance to make sure we have good weed control and till in lots of cover crops to improve the soil tilth so we have fewer issues with compaction. We use small overhead sprinklers to keep the soil surface moist while the carrots germinate, and make sure to weed at least once before the carrots are even out of the ground (since those sprinklers also speed up weed seed germination)! We plant one third to one half acre of carrots on the farm each year in a range of varieties, and have a big trial of new varieties going on in 2016.

Spring and summer carrots tend to be mild and sweet, with a nice juicy crunch. Fall carrots are crunchy and sweet, and get increasingly candy-like as the weather cools off. Winter storage carrots are extra-carroty in flavor and (fingers crossed) last into April. Carrots are related to parsnips, celery, celeriac, dill, cilantro, and fennel. Prior to the 1700's they came in a wide range of colors, but the orange one became the most popular in the last few hundred years (it's the prettiest!). However, many purple, red, yellow, and white varieties are coming back into fashion and seed catalogs in recent years--we have purple and yellow on the docket for shares this summer.

We like the uber fresh and local bunched carrots the best, which are available generally from early July through November. From December to April, we enjoy the winter storage carrots, and in May and June, we survive the carrot drought by using frozen carrots (we like to make carrot curry and carrot soup and freeze them in big batches).

One sad carrot story before we talk about preparing carrots is that the cute "baby" bagged carrots are not really babies, but just ground down adult carrots (think rock tumbler for carrots). Look for real baby carrots at markets in June!

Handling and Storing Carrots

Refrigerate in the crisper in a plastic or veggie bag, loosely closed. Carrots last months in proper storage, but you will want to check them every week or so and make sure they have adequately high humidity. If they get exposed to air they can desiccate pretty fast in a fridge. In a real root cellar, they are often stored in barrels in damp sand. You can also freeze carrots (chop them up and blanch for a few minutes first) for use later in stews and with roasts.

Remove tops before storing! Carrots, like most root vegetables, tend to keep sending their moisture up to their tops for as long as the tops are attached. To keep carrots crunchy exponentially longer, we chop those tops off before we put them into the fridge.

Can you eat the tops? is the most common carrot question we hear. It does seem a shame to compost or discard all that beautiful foliage, and some folks do enjoy eating carrot tops. We personally aren’t fans, but hear they are good in a mixed salad or saute, or as a garnish for carrot root soup. We are always happy to remove the tops for you at market--our pigs and our compost piles are happy to have them!

We recommend that you scrub the roots with a veggie brush, but we usually don’t peel our carrots except some of the larger winter ones (in winter our chickens enjoy eating the peelings!). Sometimes a trace of bitterness develops in storage (if the roots are exposed to ethylene-producing things like apples), which you can mitigate by peeling the carrots.

Preparation and General Cooking Ideas

  • Raw—we usually scrub them well with a veggie brush, chop to the preferred size, and enjoy alone or dipped in hummus. You can also grate them into salads or mix with other grated vegetables (like a carrot and cabbage slaw, which is one of our favorite winter salads).
  • Sauteed—this is our quick carrot go-to preparation! Carrots are delicious sauteed or stir fried with pretty much anything. I like to finely slice an onion and cook it for a few minutes before adding the chopped up carrot. I stir frequently, adding liquid if they start to stick, and the onions and carrots caramelize together into a delicious side dish.
  • Baked—this preparation takes a little longer, but is my favorite way. We slice the carrots lengthwise into spears, toss them in a little oil, salt, and pepper, and then bake until tender at 375. In the summer, we combine them with green beans, and the winter, spears of potato (so they are almost like healthy french fries?).
  • Steamed or blanched—lightly cooking carrots brings out even more of their sweetness and flavor, but make sure you don’t cook them too long (10 minutes tops, but we prefer more like 4 or 5 minutes) because over-cooking can destroy some of their nutrients and flavor. Steamed carrots are super-fast, and we just top them with a pat of butter and some salt and pepper.
  • In anything... Carrots are one of the most versitile vegetables, which combined with their great flavor is likely why they are such a favorite. They are good in stews, soups, curries, roasts, and the crockpot. We add them as a bonus to almost everything we make. In particular, they are a great side in dishes like meat roasts—they cook in the same pan and do a nice job of absorbing pan juices, as well as a filler that makes almost any recipe healthier and heartier! They also are great on the grill!