Planting seeds

The first seed racks are starting to sprout in stores, and my co-op is no exception. There is still snow in the foothills: it’s far too early to be planting tomatoes and beans! But we had a few mild days last month, and I got out for a few hours and turned over the garden, plowing some lovely composted steer manure under.

It’s hard to believe, but in the same season when we’re curling up with seed catalogues and graph paper, the real farmers are long past the planning stage. They’ve already placed their orders, and are already planting early starts in their greenhouses for transplanting.

Now when I say “farmer,” I’m talking about the people who still plant real seeds, tend plants, and harvest the food on land they own. There are very few of these folks around anymore, but they still exist. One of the best places to find them are CSA farms, or Community Supported Agriculture.

One of our local CSA’s (for we are blessed with several) is just over the other side of the valley towards the east, Jubilee Farm. We stumbled upon them quite by accident several years ago, visiting a work colleague whose father, like my visiting father-in-law, was a beekeeper. The farm down the road apiece had a big white barn, and oodles of pumpkins—u-pick! We had quite an adventure when Number One son managed to leave his boot behind in a mud puddle, but we truly enjoyed the positive energy that seemed to run through the place. We discovered why, when several years later, we met up with the man who owns the place, Farmer Erick, on a class field trip. A man of contagious energy, Erick put the kids to work, harvesting carrots and corn, and even gave them a sheaf of amaranth to take home. They dried its seed and planted it the next spring in the school garden. (I should mention that Erick also writes an entertaining and informative newsletter, to which I am addicted.)

Jubilee is a CSA, and I have seriously considered joining many times. Here it is subscription season again, and still I hesitate. It’s about as local as you can get, the produce is top-quality, organic—and headed to biodynamic this year. What more could I want? What’s holding me back? It’s the way we eat.

We tried a CSA-type delivery service for several months a few years back, and it was a disappointment for us. Because of our rotation diet and snacking habits, I need two meals’ worth of potatoes, 6 heads of lettuce, and around 6 pounds of apples/bananas/oranges a week. And I need that every week—no exceptions. While our share gave us plenty of vegetables for a family of four, I was still having to shop for the staples in our diet nearly every week. My grocery bills skyrocketed, and it was dismaying to see the same produce in the co-op as in my box.

What’s more, just as my own garden started to produce things like lettuce and potatoes, the box started giving me the same things I was growing. This meant I had far more than I could use, and I ended up giving things away and composting perfectly good food. There was simply no advantage other than the feel-good factor of supporting my local farmer.

So our plan for this year is the same as the last few years: potatoes, snow peas and kale will go in the ground in the coming weeks, and we’ll keep looking for the most local sources for what we don’t grow (last year I didn’t buy any lettuce for 4 months!). And you can bet we’ll be back at Jubilee in the fall for pumpkins and whatever else they’re selling at their farm stand. And we’ll be sure to bring dry socks!