CSA

We joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) this summer at Wickham Farms.  It is a weekly pick up for 18 weeks, so we split it with our good friends (and Greg's cousin) the Nudds.  It has been such a great experience and opened our eyes to some new vegetables we had never eaten before...kohlrabi!  ground (or husk) cherries!

Every Thursday one of us goes to pick up our share.  There is an herb garden you can cut from each week as well.  The bonus is that the U-Pick fields are open on Saturdays and you can go and pick your own vegetables. We have gone three weekends in a row, mainly to get the green beans, tomatillos, cherry tomatoes, and flowers.

I don't have many pictures of the kids picking vegetables but Parker is a big help and able to follow directions very well (only pick the red tomatoes, only pick the ground cherries that are on the ground).  Graham loves it but really just pulls everything and anything he can and throws it in the bag.  The fields have some deep ruts too, so by the end of it, he is filthy from falling in the mud so much. But it is such a fun experience!

Here are a couple pictures of meals made using the veggies:

zucchini fritters, grilled tilapia and shrimp, cannelloni bean salad with grilled beets & goat cheese

grilled eggplant, leeks, carrots, & beets

One Saturday at U-Pick, they had a special option to ride a hayride to the potato field, where they read some stories about potatoes, showed us how the machine digs them up, and then allowed us to pick some.  Greg was gone all day, so I took the kids and it ended up being very fun.  They were purple potatoes!

They provided donuts too!

There is a tractor way at the end that dug up a row of potatoes, then we just picked them out of the dirt

story time