After reading Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally and especially Animal Vegetable Miracle, Kim, Chris, Laura and I decided to join up and chose Harmony Valley Farm‘s CSA for 17 weeks of fresh, regionally grown, organic produce this year.
There are plenty of regional CSAs available and, if you’re interested, you can check out a list here. Basically, you pay money to a “local” farm in advance (we do it monthly via ACH which was one of the reason we went with Harmony Valley Farm — they do prefer that you pay more money up front as it gets the money into the hands of the farm to ensure that they can grow their crops for the year) and in return you get a share of the crops that they grow that year. In our case we chose the “flex plan” which allowed us to pick 17 weeks of vegetables (they also have coffee, fruit and cheese as well) that best fit our schedule. The CSA delivers to a local drop off point and the members go and pickup the vegetables in their box and may end up with some bonuses like newsletters (includes some recipes for some of the different vegetables offered) and this time, in our case, a package of herbs to grow in your own garden.
The first few boxes are generally small as the harvest season just started. We ended up with turnips, ramps, nettles (I used to curse this plant as it burns like a motherfucker when you walk through a field of it in shorts), sunchokes, sorrel, asparagus, etc. Even though I was expecting the box to be a bit on the smallish side knowing that it was early in the season and Harmony Valley Farm suffered damage due to last summer’s flooding, I did expect to see just a few more veggies than we pulled down this time.
In celebration of our harvest I invited Laura over to pick up her half of the box and I made a nice spread of marinated chicken; fried potatoes ramps, sunchokes and chives; and some sauteed asparagus that had been marinated in grape seed oil, salt and pepper. Laura brought over some organic bananas and I ate one with just peanut butter and another later with some peanut butter and Natures Nectar Honey. After all of that, I just had to try some of the sorrel (which I had picked off some pieces of leaves to try) and threw it in with the overwintered spinach, spices, bleu cheese, oil and red wine vinegar.
I had never cooked with ramps or sunchokes and I have never eaten much of what we were presented with today. I’m looking forward to coming up with some really interesting recipes and thankfully Laura has been clipping newspaper articles about odd ingredients and I have been scouring the web for the best way to use some of the great organic ingredients we will be seeing all through the summer, fall and early winter.
I know that MSPD belongs to Harmony Valley Farm as a CSA member, there has been some discussion over at MNSpeak at least twice before, and my previous-coworker Andy belonged to a CSA when he lived in Indiana. Has anyone else utilized a CSA or have any recipes for some of the stranger vegetables we’re likely to see?
Check out the pictures from the CSA pickup today on Flickr here.
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May 15th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
I love the idea of this…but I would have looked in that box and literally not known what to do with any of it. “Should I plant this? Is this a weed?”
May 15th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Nettles are not only a weed but a nuisance plant that hurts. Think temporary poison ivy. I guess it’s the same as eating a dandelion?
Other than the package of herbs, you just eat the rest — even the stuff that looks like sticks ;)
May 16th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Mrs Marcos,
Harmony Valley has a chef and with each week’s shipment they have information and recipes featuring the items in the box. Their web site also has an archive of recipes dating back a few years.
Also, http://www.epicurious.com is an excellent source of recipes. You simply type in an ingredient and you get hundreds of recipes.
In the past couple of years, the only thing from our CSA we’ve never even tried to use has been the burdock root. Apparently it’s used primarily in Asian dishes and we don’t cook as much Asian food.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:58 am
MSPD,
I’m pretty excited for the burdock root. It looks fairly versatile and from the few recipes I’ve read cooking something up stir-fry style is easy enough. While we don’t typically do “Asian cooking” at home, I am quite capable of frying some veggies and meat up in a frying pan or wok.
There’s a great recipe that doesn’t seem too “Asian” here:
May 16th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Good to know.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
We bought “Perfect Vegetables” by Cooks Illustrated when we joined our CSA. Doesn’t have some of the more exotic stuff in it, but it’ll give you fourteen good things to do with green beans when they start arriving.
May 24th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
Is anyone still doing a CSA Box? I seem to remember MSPD saying in other threads that his family still does this.
My wife and I are thinking of giving this a try, and were a bit overwhelmed by all of the options when doing a search for local CSA options. Can anyone recommend a few good options?
Thank you.
May 24th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
This year I’m giving Featherstone Farm (http://featherstonefarm.com/) a try. Great people, and I understand that the bounty if large and consistent. That said, there are lots of things to consider (proximity to home, drop sites and days, cost, quality, etc), so it matters which of these things is important to you. I did Harmony Valley last year and it was excellent.
May 24th, 2010 at 9:23 pm
Harmony Valley is the BEST! Got more soul than all the rest!
Oh, OK. I don’t know if that’s true. But I like Harmony Valley because they try new things AND they deliver on seasonal favorites too.
The nettles were cursing ME like a mo-fo after they walked through my recipe and ended up in a taco.
May 24th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
I’m on year 3 of Featherstone – and I love it! Very consistent over my 3 seasons. Can’t wait to get my fresh salad greens next week!
May 24th, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Year four of Harmony Valley and still very satisfied. We get vegetables, fruit and coffee shares.
May 25th, 2010 at 9:10 am
I looked at Harmony Valley, and we were thinking the Fruit and Veggtables, but it appears at least the veggies are sold out for this year.
Thank you all for the responses. Time for some research.
May 25th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Yes, the vegetable shares have been selling out the last two years.
May 25th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Here are some of my more recent thoughts about HVF’s CSA and how I choose to get my vegetables instead: http://simplegoodandtasty.com/2010/03/10/still-searching-for-a-csa-consider-this#comment-4009
May 25th, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Thanks Bill. I just read through that, and it is great info. We have been going back and forth for a few days.
Another question though. I thought at one point I read that you had done a CSA that included meat? Was that my imagination?
May 25th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
I totally respect Bill’s assessment. I will say though that the HVF boxes we’ve gotten last year and this year so far are much more abundant than the ones during that year. I really think having nearly entire farm flooded like that really set things back for them. I wish you could have experienced an “up” year.
Right now, being as busy as I am, I wouldn’t have the time/organization to make shopping farmer’s markets and co-ops work on a regular basis and achieve the same outcome I get from picking up the CSA box.
May 25th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Chad, I was certainly interested in CSAs that offered meat shares but after much research I picked Blue Gentian Farm as my provider of meat. He’s available at the Minneapolis Farmers Market on the weekends and it makes it easy for me to get what I need–even down to an ala carte method instead of something more traditional like a 1/4 or 1/2 animal. I get 75% of my meat from BGF (I buy chicken in bulk from the co-op) and honestly I believe it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. You can find the post about it here: http://www.lazylightning.org/44lbs-of-blue-gentian-farm-meat
MSPD, even if it had been an “up” year I am not quite certain it would have worked for us. The overabundance of vegetables that are not “standard” do not appeal to my wife and thus were left to me to consume. While that would be fine if the prices had been reasonable, they were too expensive for me to be purchasing the CSA box for myself and then more standard vegetables for my wife. Basically what it came down to was other methods worked better for my family. A great experience but not one that we can afford to do again when much better options exist for us.
May 25th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Amen to that. I have the benefit of 5 people eating whatever crazy stuff comes in the box.
Although we still haven’t used a burdock root….maybe I’ll give you ours this year.