(CSA Newsletter: Week 31)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Juliet tomatoes — These small sweet Roma-style tomatoes are a September treat! They ripen and hold on the vine better than other varieties, so we can wait and pick lots at once for you. They have lower water content, making them great for eating on salads or cooked in sauces.
- Sweet peppers — More of our delicious ripe sweet peppers! We eat these in everything this time of year: stir-fries, pasta dishes, salads, sandwiches, etc.
- Broccoli OR chard
- Cucumbers OR zucchini/summer squash — If you haven’t caught on yet, you’re welcome to mix and match what you take from this bin. So, you can have all zucchini, all cucumber, or a few of each.
- Lettuce — This week’s lettuce is a heat loving crisp head. It’s reminiscent of “iceberg” style lettuce, but with much more flavor (and presumably more nutritional value too).
- Potatoes — More tasty “Reddale” potatoes — red skins with smooth white flesh inside. We’ve been enjoying roasting them and eating with our summer hamburgers!
- Sweet onions — Perfect for every use (and especially tasty as rings on those same summer hamburgers!).
We’re officially two-thirds of the way through the 2010 CSA season, which means it’s time for us to check in with you about your experience so far this year. We like to take tabs at about the same time of year, and September always feels about right … we’re still in the thick of summer but starting to plan more seriously for the following year.
Returning CSA members will notice one significant difference in this year’s survey — it’s much longer and more specific! After five years of feeling successful with our current CSA model, we’re thinking about tinkering with some basics for the first time.
To the point, after years of hearing that people want more choice and the option of buying a smaller share, we think we might have a new model that could accommodate both desires.
If we implemented the changes, members would choose upfront a MEDIUM (~5 items/week) or a LARGE (~8 items/week) share. Each week, we’d bring 9-10 items to the pick-up, and members would then choose what they want based on the size of their share. So, if you have a medium share, you’d choose your five favorite veggies from our offering; and if you have a large share, you’d choose eight.
We’re still working through the logistics of this new model of pick-up, and we may decide that it’s just too crazy to try, but we’re interested in hearing your opinion and thoughts too as we plan.
Also, so that we can better plan our CSA planting schedules in any case, we’ve included an extensive “vegetable preference survey” asking you to rate how much you like each kind of vegetable in terms of how frequently you like to eat it. This information will directly inform our seed orders and planting schedule.
There are a few other questions too, all adding up to quite an extensive survey. We know that it will require more of your time than we’ve asked for in past years, but we do hope that you can take 15 minutes to sit down and share your thoughts with us. We value the face-to-face communication we have with you each week, but it’s also invaluable for us to get a bigger picture sense of your experience in the CSA.
If you have any questions or immediate concerns, please contact us at any time by email or phone.
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
