I expect it to be between $15 (June) and $40/week (August and September). The first two weeks are relatively light to avoid swamping you with greens. I am told our taste is much superior to supermarket produce, and your value is good. And you don't need to worry about the effects of soil fumigation, chemical sprays, and diluted nutrient content on your food.
My challenge, particularly in August and September is to not overwhelm you, and to find the balance between value for you and financially supporting our farm. The benefits for you are great tasting, garden fresh vegetables, grown without poisons and grown in a manner to produce high nutrient content, at a reasonable price.
The benefits for us are: 1) our produce is "pre-sold", 2) we don't have to deal with prices and money during the busy distribution, and 3) if we have enough members we will drop the farmers markets, which will free up a couple days a week so we can do a better job of production and harvest. We still need a baseline income (determined by the number of members we can provide for) for personal needs and to reinvest in the farm. It needs to be a "win-win" arrangement.
What vegetables will I get?
| Sample weekly share in early July: | ||
| Salad mix Baby onions Broccoli Yellow Squash Herbs (dill, cilantro) |
Lettuce Peas Spinach Baby beets New potatoes |
|
| Sample weekly share in August: | ||
| Snap beans Tomatoes Scallopini squash Salad mix Carrots Herbs (basil, rosemary, etc) |
Cucumbers Napa Cabbage Swiss Chard Potatoes Sweet onions |
|
| Sample weekly share in October: | ||
| Leeks Cauliflower Winter squash Kale Salad mix Sweet potatoes | Lettuce Beets Carrots Herbs (cilantro, celery, parsley, dill) | |
We try to provide good basics, such as potatoes, broccoli, salad mix, orange carrots, and round red tomatoes, with a sprinkling of the less usual - heirloom tomatoes, savoy cabbage, fennel, golden beets, purple carrots, etc. for variety.
What if I don't want something?
We try to offer a variety to choose from. For instance you may be allowed to pick 5 things off a table of cucumbers, yellow squash, green and gold zucchini, and scallopini squash. You may be able to select from spinach, swiss chard, or arugula. We do encourage you to try new ways with things to see if you can enjoyably add a healthy vegetable to your diet. This is an advantage of you coming out to select your vegetables rather than having prepacked boxes delivered to town.
How much sweet corn will I get?
None. We do not grow sweet corn. It is difficult to grow well organically on as small a scale as we would grow it. If we are going to grow corn, it will be for organic feed for our poultry.
You are encouraged to split a share with a friend. Some folks alternate weeks, others divide each share. Sometimes you need to take a vegetable home and cut it to divide a share.
What if I can't come one week?
There are several options. Let us know ahead and we will box up a share for you and put it in our cooler for you to pick up later. Or you can have a family member or friend come get your share, either for you or for them to enjoy that week. We send weekly email reminders out to help you remember to come.
Can I back
out?
When
you sign-up, you dedicate yourself to being
our customer for the year, thus providing us a
secure market – a
welcome measure of certainty
in the fickle world
of farming! We, in
turn, dedicate ourselves to
being your farmers,
providing you
with great tasting, nutritious vegetables. That said, CSA is not for
everyone. If the season has not yet started and you have
made full payment, we will refund your payment minus the deposit. After
the season starts, you are allowed to find someone to take over your
share.
What guarantee do I
have?
We plant about 10% more than we think we will need, to provide a safety
net.
We can give you names of some previous years' members to see how well
satisfied they were. One of the tenets of the Community Supported
Agriculture (CSA) movement is that the farmer and the consumer partner
together. The farmer does his/her best and the consumer encourages the
continuance of the farm by accepting that nature can make farming
unpredictable and even risky at times.
We are making investments of time, energy, and money
to reduce the risk to a minimum. We paid over $5,000 in the fall of
2007 to have three acres tile drained. This means we can continue field
work within a day or two of rain. We are upgrading equipment
to
be more time efficient. We are reducing broiler production to
have more time for the CSA's vegetable production. But, there
are
no guarantees of a
particular vegetable at a particular time or of a certain amount of
vegetables.
Things happen. There might be a hailstorm. In 2009 late blight, a
serious disease of potatoes and tomatoes, was spread throughout the
northeast. We saved our hoophouse tomatoes so everyone had tomatoes
through September, and mowed our potatoes down early to protect them.
There are no guarantees that something won't damage a crop.
You do have our reputation and word, which are good, that we act
responsibly.
More questions?
Email us.
This website is a home-grown product of Rehoboth Homestead. Please let us know if you have questions, comments, or problems. We do warn you, though, that during the summer we are so busy farming that we don't check our email very often. Please be patient.