CSA Roundup

I sent off the final payment for our 2009 CSA the other day (late, because I am full of forgetfulness and fail). Overall, the farm share–our first and, I’m almost certain, not our last–was a really delightful experiment. I loved getting my giant green shopping bag home every week, unloading everything onto the kitchen table and imagining all the dinners I might make with the haul. I loved the tiny, sweet strawberries and the floppy bunches of dill and the chance to make kohlrabi fries. I loved our handsome farmer and the sweet  girl who checked my name off the list at pickup time. And I especially loved the bread share. Even if my ass did not.

Still, especially as we moved into the colder months and I wound up with twenty pounds of squash and kale and onions every week, it occurred to me more than once since June that a CSA–even a half share–isn’t particularly compatible with the way Tom and I live now. It was too much food, first of all. Even if we stayed home and cooked every night–which we basically never do–I’d still wind up with veg left over at the end of the week, a green bunch of something liquefying in my fridge. I gave away a lot of zucchini and lettuce and cabbage, and even though it made me popular at work and happy to share what we had, the CSA wasn’t exactly a cheap proposition–it was frustrating to feel so perpetually wasteful.

The cost was an issue in other ways, too. Our pickups tended to be really veg-heavy, and while that was awesome in theory, it also meant that I spent all of July and August walking past the farmer’s market fighting peach and plum envy because I had a crisper full of really expensive chard at home. And that’s when I was there to pick it up: this past summer, my schedule was so wonky that making sure somebody was there on Tuesdays between 3 and 6 to haul everything home became a project unto itself. Tom was more or less willing to go until the day he forgot the reusable bags and, he grumbled, “the woman yelled at me for polluting the environment!”

None of this is to say that I’d never do a CSA again. Quite the opposite, actually–I love the whole idea of being a part of an enterprise like this, and I’d absolutely recommend it to anybody who asked. But I think I’ll probably wait a few years before I do another round myself–’til we’re more settled, have more money–and can bear to look at another butternut squash.