What is the value of a share?
I aim to give you a 20% discount off our farmers market prices when you pick up at the farm. We add in a small packing and delivery fee for the City of Plattsburgh and Lake Placid Farmers Market distributions to offset our additional labor and vehicle expenses. The first weeks in June are relatively light to avoid swamping you with greens, though we expect to have June strawberries in 2012. Then we make it up during tomato season. 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, GMOs, and diluted nutrient content on your food.
My challenge, particularly in 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” and we don’t have to deal with prices and money during the busy distribution. We do need a baseline income 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 June: | ||
| Salad mix Scallions Radishes or Hakurei Herbs (dill, cilantro) |
Strawberries Lettuce Carrots Spinach or other greens |
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| Sample weekly share in July: | ||
| Salad mix Garlic scapes Tomatoes Yellow Squash Herbs (dill, cilantro, basil) |
Lettuce Peas Spinach Baby beets New potatoes |
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| Sample weekly share in August: | ||
| Snap beans Tomatoes Zucchini Lettuce Carrots Herbs (basil, rosemary, etc) |
Garlic Cucumbers Napa Cabbage Swiss Chard Gold Potatoes Sweet onions |
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| Sample weekly share in October: | ||
| Leeks Garlic Cauliflower Winter squash Kale Salad mix |
Lettuce Fingerling Potatoes Beets Carrots Herbs (cilantro, celery, parsley, dill) Sweet potatoes |
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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. Those of you picking up at the farm on Tuesday 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. For those who opt to pick up prepacked shares, we seed a “swap table” where you can swap out something in your share for something on the table.
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.
What if I can’t eat that much?
We now offer two share sizes: small and full. The small shouldn’t overwhelm one or two people. The full share is good for fresh vegetable eating vegetarians and for families. Volume-wise, the full share usually overflows two store shopping bags.
What if I can’t come one week?
We send weekly email reminders out to help you remember to come. If you won’t be able to come, you can have a family member or friend come get your share, either for you or for them to enjoy that week.
Why do you increase the price if we join after January?
We map out how much of what gets planted and harvested when, to see how much we have space for. We can’t wait until June for folks to decide to join, because by then we already have our crop plans drawn up, things planted, and have committed to area farmers markets. We order our seed in January, seed potatoes in early March at the latest, and commit to farmers markets in March. For the CSA, we make sure we plant a wide variety, some of which we wouldn’t bother with if just doing farmers markets. In the space we have left after committing to CSA crops, we look at how much space each crop takes in the truck and on the table at farmers markets vs their value. When we figure how much of what to plant, we have to consider what fits into various parts of our crop rotation, so it isn’t just as easy as cutting everything back 25% or increasing everything by 25% in May or June.
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 buy out our 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. 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. In 2011 we did OK through the wet spring, but had times during the extremely dry summer when we could not seed and when transplants did not grow well. We had “enough”, but not as much variety as we would like. 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.
