In the last CSA tote of the season: lots of veggies that keep for almost forever!
- Leeks
- Yellow Potatoes
- Purple Daikon Radish
- Beet Medley - Red, Gold and Chioggia
- Winter Kohlrabi
- Winter Candy Carrots
- Red Storage Cabbage
- Tetsu Kabocha Winter Squash
- Chioggia Radicchio
- Celeriac
Our twenty-eight week CSA season is long, and it's short, slow and fast, somehow all of these paradoxical things. It reminds me a lot of raising kids: it was just yesterday that they were teething, and now they're almost legally driving (not that a bunch of illegal driving has been happening around the farm, but maybe a little...:). If the weekly CSA shares are any testament, it has indeed been another "full" season . We track the CSA value all year long based on what's going into the weekly share, and this year the actual value of your $950 Harvest Basket was $1,100.48, or $150.48 (16%) in bonus produce. For those of you whose chief complaint about the Valley Flora CSA is "too much food," we apologize yet again. After 16 years of offering the CSA, I think it's finally time to face the fact that it's not in our molecular makeup to put less food in the tote each week, no matter how hard we try to keep things under control. If the target is $35 in produce value each week, we inevitably seem to put $40 (yes, sometimes $50) of goodies in your tote instead. Hopefully most of you have found creative ways to enjoy the bounty. The good news about this final share is that most everything in it will keep for weeks, if not months - so if all that fall abundance is backlogged in your fridge, this final delivery of produce can wait its turn in the crisper drawer, no problemo (your Tetsu squash can sit on the counter or in the pantry and will likely still be great next May).
Half of you will be part of our Winter CSA, which starts in mid-January (first delivery scheduled for January 15th, more details to come early in the new year). And for any and all who want to sign up for our main "summer" season again in 2025, we'll be reaching out to you in the second half of January with a priority sign-up invitation. We love it when folks come back for more, and many of you have been since 2009! We generally have a 75%-80% retention rate each year, which is high compared to other CSA's we've compared notes with. Even so we're passionate about improvement on the farm, so if you have any feedback you'd like to share with us PLEASE do so! We don't do a formal end-of-season survey (previous attempts at that proved to be marginally useful since effective survey design is an art unto itself), but we encourage you to email us with anything that's top-of-mind for you: why you won't be signing up again, why you will be, what you loved most about the CSA or could do without.
Before I sign off for 2024 I want to say a huge thank you to our hardworking farm crew. We found ourselves short-handed a few too many times to count this season due to all manner of the unexpected, and yet we still managed to get 'er done, thanks to everyone digging deep, always going the extra mile, and giving their all. I couldn't ask for a more dedicated, highly-skilled team and I am grateful beyond words to call them my farm family: Roberto, Allen, Jen, Sarah and the two who saved us repeatedly in a pinch: Donna and Sarah Kate!
Finally, our gratitude to you, our CSA membership. I say this every year because it's still true: our CSA is the core of Valley Flora, and has been since 2009. Even though we sell our product through other market channels - our farmstand, stores, co-ops, restaurants, the CSA is the center pivot around which all of our crop planning and production revolves. We grow cabbage (and a hundred other crops) for YOU, and if there's extra we'll sell it through our other market channels. Filling your totes with a wide variety of colorful produce every week creates the imperative for crop diversity, which in turn results in the beautiful polyculture that is Valley Flora. I wouldn't want it any other way - and neither would our healthy farm fields and all the humming biology therein - so my heartfelt thanks for being the reason for the season (and I don't mean Christmas, although I hope you have a merry one of those as well!).
Until next year!
Zoë
(P.S. If you're looking for a great gift idea for the gardener in your life, here's a rich idea that checks all the boxes for a locally-sourced gift that keeps giving: SeaCoast Compost! We are so lucky to have a commercial, biodynamic compost-maker in our community, producing some of the finest black gold there is. It's available directly from their nursery in Charleston, or at B&B Farm Supply in Langlois, or lots of other garden/hardware stores on the Southcoast. If you're a glutton for compost like we are, you can also have it delivered by the sleigh-er-dumptruck-load (thank you David & Athena!).
