CSA

I said something yesterday on the diet blog about increasing my veggie intake. A bit later, Matt emailed me with a link to Dominion Harvest, a local CSA. Our friend Vicki found them a while back, and I'd given some thought to signing up, but hadn't gotten around to asking for the link.

Since Matt had the link ready to hand, and I've been thinking about trying this out since I first heard about CSAs a few years ago, I decided to sign us up. CSA, if you didn't feel like following the link above and haven't heard of it before, stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and is basically a buy-in to one or more local farms. Typically, you pay a set fee, and then you get a share of whatever happens to be producing at the time.

I'm hoping this will be a great opportunity for us to help support our community and to be exposed to produce (some of it possibly even new for us!) when it's perfectly in-season and therefore tasting its best. The website says they do deliveries sometime in the Wed-Fri timeframe, which makes it perfect for my menu planning (which I usually do on Thursdays or Fridays) -- I'll know what we've received and be able to incorporate things into my plans.

Of course, it's possible that we'll just end up with a lot of food turning fuzzy and brown in the bottom of the fridge every couple of weeks, so to start, I signed us up for the standard produce box every two weeks. If it works out great and we're eating the veggies and fruits and loving it, we might consider upping it to weekly. I don't see us ramping up to one of the eggs/cheese/bread/meat boxes, because we really don't eat as much of those things. (Or more precisely, we mostly eat diet-friendly versions of those things, like low-fat cheese and low-carb bread.) But if they show up in the "add-ons" section, I might consider throwing them in from time to time.

I'm kind of weirdly excited about this, and looking forward to deliveries starting in May.