Ending the CSA season.

Our friend Ben, Silence Dogood, and our black German shepherd puppy Shiloh were very sad to arrive on Friday for our last CSA pickup of the season.

For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of CSAs, no, we’re not talking about a pickup truck adorned with a Confederate flag and blaring “Sweet Home Alabama” out the open windows. (And before someone accuses us of Skynyrd-bashing, we think Lynyrd Skynyrd ranks in the Top Five American rock bands of all time, and “Sweet Home Alabama” is one of the greatest rock anthems ever written, perhaps ranking second after that greatest of all rock anthems, “Stairway to Heaven.” In fact, we were recently challenged to name the most iconic American rock band of all time, and it was with the greatest reluctance that we finally set Skynyrd aside in favor of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band. But we digress.)

For our purposes, a CSA is an organic subscription farm, where members join up the fall or winter before the growing season and agree to pay an upfront price to enjoy the farm’s produce throughout the growing season to come. (“CSA” literally stands for “Consumer-Supported Agriculture,” but we loathe that bureaucratese. Surely anytime anybody buys groceries, it’s an act of “consumer-supported agriculture.” Ugh.) By paying upfront, members cover the costs of seeds and plants, soil amendments, and labor, and this also allows the farmers to know how many members they’ll have and thus how much to grow. In turn, members sign on for fresh, local, organic food every week of the growing season, and they often get an added benefit: delectable heirloom varieties and unusual produce that would command premium prices if it could even be found in an upscale grocery store.

There’s no general standard for CSAs, so what you get, how much you pay, how long the season stretches, and whether you have to actually work a number of hours doing farm maintenance (like a coop) are all up to the individual farmers. But we think out own local CSA, Quiet Creek Farm, sets the gold standard. It has three benefits that matter to us personally: It’s just five minutes from our house; it’s located on the grounds of the Rodale Institute, the premier organic experimental farm in America; and everybody falls all over Shiloh when we bring her along to pick up our produce, so she loves our weekly visits.

But Quiet Creek has plenty of benefits you don’t have to live at Hawk’s Haven to appreciate. First of all, the quality and diversity of its weekly offerings is outstanding. Farmers John and Aimee Good e-mail every member weekly to let them know what will be offered that week and to provide recipes for the week’s offerings. (They also provide printouts of the recipes and tips to store the produce at the pickup barn.) From celeriac, tiny striped ‘Fairy Tale’ eggplant, and garlic scapes to salad turnips, rainbow-colored Swiss chard, and heirloom tomatoes, you can be sure you’ll be getting something in your weekly share that you’d be unable to find (or at least find easily) elsewhere.

Second on our list of benefits is flexibility. Foremost here are the selection options Quiet Creek offers. If you’re not fond of, say, beets or radishes, you can choose summer squash or celery or at least a half-dozen options every week instead. Quiet Creek also offers a full share or a half-share (for smaller families or singles), and will let you split a full share as well if you can find a willing partner. John and Aimee have partnered for the past couple of years with a simply amazing local organic orchard, North Star Orchard, owned by Ike and Lisa Kerschner, to give CSA members the option of purchasing a fruit share as well as their CSA share and picking up an overflowing carton of the most luscious and luxurious fruits throughout the fruit-growing season. (Silence says: These fruits are the best we’ve ever had. And they’re organic!) They’re thinking of partnering with local organic artisanal bakers to offer weekly bread shares as well. And you get two days for your produce pickup, Tuesdays and Fridays from 2 to 7 p.m., so you can choose the day and time that suits your schedule.

Third for us are the additional staples we can buy when we drop by the barn to pick up our weekly share. Quiet Creek partners with local organic producers to offer organic free-range eggs, grass-raised meat, sausage, and other meat products, raw milk cheeses (from both goat’s and cow’s milk), yogurt, and cheese spreads, honey, spelt flour, spelt breads, and handmade herbal soaps and beeswax products. And the Rodale Institute offers CSA members a chance  to buy their organic apples and pumpkins in season and their fresh-pressed organic apple cider (the sweetest and best we’ve ever had).  

Then there are the benefits that are beyond ranking, as far as we’re concerned. Every year, Farmer Aimee offers classes in preserving the bounty, including canning, drying, and freezing techniques. And then there’s our all-time favorite benefit of belonging to the CSA: the U-Pick Garden. This huge area offers an unbelievable wealth of pickable produce: numerous herbs, including our favorites, cilantro and basil, in all-you-can pick bounty; cut flowers, from nasturtiums to sunflowers to everlastings; cherry and plum tomatoes; green, yellow wax, and ‘Dragon Tongue’ (the best-ever) beans; edamame; a huge assortment of hot peppers; strawberries and raspberries; snow and sugar snap peas. We know we’re forgetting things, too. Silence loves gathering basil and cilantro for Caprese salads, pesto, stir-fries and sautees, Thai curries, and refried beans. She’s also a big fan of the snap beans, be they green, wax, or our beloved ‘Dragon Tongue’, and of snow and snap peas, too. Meanwhile, OFB and Shiloh enjoy roaming the garden in search of the best hot peppers and cherry tomatoes. (And of course we don’t feed Shiloh hot peppers! But she does enjoy the tomatoes.) Frankly, we think having access to the U-Pick Garden would be reason enough to belong to our CSA.

If you’re fortunate enough to live in Berks or Lehigh County, PA, check out Quiet Creek Farm online or contact John and Aimee Good at goodfarmers@ptd.net to enquire about membership for 2010. Otherwise, see what the CSAs are offering in your neighborhood.

And at last getting back to the topic of our post, this past Friday was the final pickup for our CSA produce. Here’s what we brought home: tender carrots, a beautiful red cabbage, garlic and yellow storage onions, potatoes, Mizuna greens, leeks, green-black tongues of the revered ‘Laciniato’ heirloom kale, ‘Oakleaf’ and ‘Red Romaine’ lettuce, ‘Delicata’ squash, ‘Acorn’ squash, and beautiful broccoli heads. And needless to say, we had plenty of other choices, including lovely purple bell peppers, celeriac, and rutabagas, as well as many more we can’t even remember.

One of the things we—or, at least, Silence—enjoys about CSA season is the challenge of using all the weekly produce so none of it goes to waste. Lots of it ends up in our nightly salads—we both love big, bold, hearty salads—while some of it goes to our Friday Night Supper Club friends, and any leftover leaves and etc. typically go to our chickens, unless Shiloh and our parrot Plutarch demand their share. Otherwise, it’s up to Silence to come up with recipes for our bounty that she thinks we’ll both really enjoy. Those who know Silence can appreciate that she seldom falls short!

Last night, Silence turned to our friend Ben as she was serving up a huge tossed salad, luscious black bean soup, and oven-hot cornbread, and said “You know, Ben, now we’re on our own. Now that CSA season is over, I guess I’ll have to plan our menus more carefully, and we’ll have to pick up what we need from our local farmers’ market and grocery store. But boy, will I miss our CSA!!!”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.