"A CSK doesn't just deliver local, sustainable product, it provides you with a ready-to-eat meal." [Flickr: Neighborhood Notes] You try your best to be green, buying local when you can, recycling, conserving water, the list goes on. But when it comes to participating in a Community Supported Agriculture (or CSA) share, you stop short. Unknown quantities of a random assortment of vegetables piling up on you week after week? Eeek. If this sounds like you, or maybe you don't like too cook or find it too time-consuming or too isolating, Community Supported Kitchens to the rescue! A Community Supported Kitchen (CSK) is a new idea to connect farmers and eaters, especially those eaters who wand to eat locally, but currently...
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Note: Meet Your Farmers is a weekly series where we profile the farmers that mean so much to serious eaters everywhere. This week we introduce you to a young couple in Virginia (with a little farmer of their own on the way) who met through farming and are now making a living out of it. [Photographs: Lisa Moussalli] Name: Lisa and Ali Moussalli Farm: Frog Bottom Farm in Pamplin, Virginia How many acres? 25 acres with eight to ten under cultivation Your crew: Every year we hire a small crew of seasonal workers to join us planting vegetables, harvesting them, sharing them with customers through the CSA program and farmers' markets, and tending to our farm animals. Most of them...
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Note: Meet Your Farmers is a Monday morning series where we profile the farmers that mean so much to serious eaters everywhere. This week, Penny Cherubino of BostonZest introduces us to John Lee. [Penny Cherubino] Name: John Lee Farm: Allandale Farm, "Boston's last working farm" in Brookline, Massachusetts How many acres? 30 Your crew: I manage two crews, one for production and one for market. Both crews are local. However, my field crew (many of whom have worked for me for many years) are almost all of Latino descent and have done farm work most of their lives. It is what they love to do, and we try to make it as easy and as much fun as possible. Hours:...
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Food makers across the country have taken the idea of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program and run with it. There are thousands of traditional fruit and vegetable CSA programs in the United States (go to LocalHarvest to find one in your neighborhood). Generally, consumers sign-up in the winter months for a "share" of a local farmer's harvest come spring and summer. This ensures that farmers get cash for repairs, seeds, supplies, and tools when they need it most: in the barren, vegetable-less winter months when they have no regular income. Doing sign-ups in the cold months also allows farmers to make a better guess of the demand for their product and how much they should plant. Below are...
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It's always perplexed me to watch Florida, that perma-tropic state, import its strawberries from Mexico, lemons from Seville, and oranges--I kid you not--from California, when all of these grow prolifically in our own back yards (or at least they did, before cutting crews cut down all the citrus trees during the canker scare of '02--I swear, if it's not one thing it's another). But this article in the Palm Beach Post claims to have seen people joining forces to buy organic food. Have I judged my people too harshly?...
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