A Mommy Story

This year we decided to be wild and crazy and join a CSA. What’s a CSA, you ask? Well, you could click the link that explains it, or I could just tell you that it’s like buying a share of a local farm. You pay your set price for a share of the farm, helping the farm cover operating expenses, and in return you get a share of the harvest from that farm.

Every week we get new and delicious vegetables delivered to our door. I’ll admit – I’m not much of a vegetable expert, and occasionally I find something green in the cooler that I don’t recognize. But most of the time I get excited to peek in the cooler, seeing a vegetable I wouldn’t have ever thought of buying, but something I know I like.

This is what greeted me the first week:

And this week, when I checked to see what the produce fairy had left on my doorstep, I squealed as I spied several ears of sweet corn and a green pepper, along with some lettuce, green onions and spinach.

So far I’m loving our CSA. It’s giving me a reason to eat more vegetables – I’ve had corn two nights in a row now, and will likely have it tonight as well – and we’re helping to support a local farm. We know where our food came from, we know how they grow it, and we can visit the farm any day we want to. And our food doesn’t have to travel long distances to reach us, reducing the amount of energy required to transport it.

If you have a CSA in your area, I highly recommend looking into it. If not, or if you can’t commit to that amount of produce, find a farmer’s market nearby and search for local fruits and vegetables on a per-week basis. I can’t guarantee it’ll make your kids want to eat their vegetables any more than they do now, but it might get them a little more excited about learning about where their food comes from.