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Jun. 10th, 2009 @ 10:02 pm CSA Bandwagon
I was pretty excited to get a farm share for this summer, and found a couple classmates to split it with. Designed for a family of four, we are splitting it three ways, so fairly thin I guess.

Today was finally the first pickup!

One of our sharers was going to go with me to get it, but she worked overnight last night and then got distracted by something this morning and didn't go to bed until afternoon. So I dragged EP.

It is an hour drive to the farm where we must pick up the share, with potential for ugly traffic. Traffic looked like it might be bad on the way home, but really the drive time was about the same.

Anyway, we picked up the share, and it was somehow somewhat less than I was hoping for. The list of produce to expect is pretty long, so I am hoping that it is just a function of being the first crops of the season, etc and that things just aren't up and running fully yet. For example, their farm stand doesn't open for another few days.

We got a head of red lettuce, tatsoi, "braising greens" and a pint of strawberries. And an adorable basil plant. Adorable. Mini.

I dutifully split these things equally, with the exception of the basil plant, as it doesn't split. I appropriated that and made the unilateral decision that first dibs on unique indivisible items should go to the driver. I imagine there could be more.

They are all nice looking veggies, so that's good. And certainly there is more tatsoi and braising greens than I know what to do with already...

It is a weekly pickup, so pretty driving intensive and hopefully EP doesn't get defaulted too many times because how painful for him to be a slave to my whim!
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From:[info]arobynne
Date: June 11th, 2009 02:59 am (UTC)
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Our CSA shares are definitely heavy on the greens and thinner in the early season than later in the summer. Splitting three ways though could be tricky sometimes. We split with Dan's sister and generally try to each take half of everything, but that doesn't work with melons or squashes. Dividing by three will probably mean letting someone have lettuce one week while someone else takes the asparagus unless you want to each only have a couple stalks apiece. That said, we still have a few things from our last Thursday's box in the fridge with new coming tomorrow, so having fewer things to eat could be a good thing. Bummer about the drive there -- I thought our 25 minute-in-rush-hour pick up was annoying.
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From:[info]hexagonalcarbon
Date: June 12th, 2009 01:13 am (UTC)
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A farm share sounds really fun and interesting, but there is no way I would drive two hours a week for some vegetables. Why doesn't that lazy farmer bring your things into the city? The carbon footprint of that scheme would be much better.

Also I would expect to receive way too much produce, and then feel guilty every time one of them rotted. Do you actually eat many plants now?
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From:[info]dortz
Date: June 13th, 2009 12:43 am (UTC)
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I am getting better with plants, but I am still no pro. Probably if we had the full share a lot of it would go to waste, thus the thin split.

As for the driving thing, it is hard to get around. The farm is only a little further from NYC than it is from New Haven, and only a but further from Hartford too, I imagine. So the area of people that they can catch is pretty big, and I bet a lot of them aren't from the city anyway, so it is probably more of a pain for them to send the veggies to a bunch of places than to have us all come get it and potentially rig our own fuel and time reducing plants.