Community Supported Agriculture

This year, my mother and I went in together on buying a share in a Community Supported Agriculture farm.

You buy a portion of the harvest and either go pick up your fruits and veggies or they're delivered to you or somewhere on a (usually) weekly schedule. You ensure your family good, wholesome produce, help a local farm be successful and contribute to the local economy. By choosing organic, you help protect our soil and the future of our food supply.

We chose http://www.lovefarmorganics.com/ this year and we've been very happy with them so far. They have a wide selection of veggies but berries are a separate share, although sometimes you'll get them anyway. The first week that we got carrots, WOW!, so delicious my kids gobbled them all in one day. There's also been beets, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, a round cucumber (lemon cucumbers maybe? they were GREAT), zucchini, summer squash, gorgeous purple onions, radishes, kale, basil (smells SO good), blueberries, beautiful little tomatoes and a lot more. Amy Love puts up a blog with recipe ideas which I confess I haven't used yet but we had fun making vegan borscht with the beets and cucumbers. I chose them as our first CSA farm as their prices were lower than others, they were all organic and they're a family farm. We pick up our veggies weekly at a house in SW Portland and I think they also go to the Hillsdale Farmer's Market or you can go pick up at their farm in Forest Grove.

You can find CSA farms with fruit, veggies, eggs, beef, lamb, dairy, chickens, turkey, duck, honey, pretty much just about anything. You can find out more about the CSA concept and CSA farms in the Portland area at http://portlandcsa.org/.