Earth To Eats

Spiral Path Farm 2010 Season – first box came today

20th May, 2010 - Posted by shawn - No Comments

Even though we grow a garden, we also subscribe to a CSA with Spiral Path Farm.  If you aren’t familiar with what a CSA is, the acronym stands for “Community Supported Agriculture.”  With most CSA’s you sign up early in the growing season for a membership with them and you pay them a fee up front.  The farm uses that money to plant and grow crops that year and you, as a member, get a share of what is produced.

In Spiral Path’s case they offer half and full shares (you can see their pricing here - it is not too late to sign up, they pro-rate the cost) and in return for our membership fee we will receive a box of organic produce once a week from now until the week of Thanksgiving -that is 28 weeks.  We subscribe for a full share since there are five of us and we love it.  Our cost works out to be about $20 a week.

In addition to the weekly boxes of produce you have an invitation to visit the farm once a month for open farm days when additional produce is available to members of the CSA only.  Herbs, strawberries and peppers are some of the things you can pick yourself to take home with you.

There is some excitement each week as we wait to see what the box will hold – often there are surprises. So this week our box looked like this – filled to the rim with greens and heavier than I expected.  Spiral Path packages their produce in a biodegradable plastic bag.  Most of the time we just grab the bag and leave the box, but since this was the first week I wanted to show a picture of the box.

Inside the box was our weekly newsletter from the farm.  It is always interesting to hear what is going on and usually a recipe is included that features some of the items you received in your box.  This week the recipe is a Spinach Colcannon and we are planning on trying it tomorrow night.

The produce we received this time included: 2 pints of strawberries (a surprise, ours are just coming in), 5 1/2 lbs of small red potatoes (Spiral Path purchased these from another farmer as a bonus and this is why the box was heavier than I was expecting), 1 head green lettuce, 1/2 lb of baby lettuce mix (mostly red oakleaf), 1 1/4 lbs broccoli (also purchased from another farmer), 3/4 lb spinach, and 8 spring onions.

The first few boxes of the spring are always greens heavy as we wait for other things to mature.  Tonight for dinner we used up half of the baby lettuce mix in a family salad and half of the spring onions – our youngest daughter loves them.  I cut up the strawberries and everyone had a few of those as well.

Tomorrow we will use the potatoes and the spinach for dinner in the new recipe plus the onions.  That’ll leave us with the makings for salad and broccoli for a side dish for next week until the next box comes on Thursday.