We picked up our last every-week CSA box tonight. We'll have 4 or 5 more pickups once per fortnight until Christmas because our farm uses root cellaring. We decided against extending it further with the two January boxes this year. At this point in the season, even my food-adventurous BIL looks at the turnips and suggests we feed them to the chickens. We only pay $13 per half-box, then another $40 per full box of bi-weekly fruit from June to October. The forms for next year will be sent out soon and I'm not sure what I want to do. We grow a fair amount in our garden, but not enough to support ourselves entirely. We didn't usually have a chance to eat our lettuce during the month it was available because we felt the need to eat the CSA lettuce first. We had as many green beans as we could eat, which is fine by the boys and I, but Dan got tired of them eventually. We don't grow enough tomatoes to can our own (I don't understand why not -- I had a ridiculous quantity of plants), but Leo can stuff himself with little ones and I can use the bigger fresh ones in dishes. Melons and pumpkins didn't get anywhere. My point is, the garden produces food, but we need it to be supplemented. I figured that with the half-box, it would be just right, but the proportion of want-to-eat vs weird wasn't high enough. I buy a substantial amount of vegetables in bulk at farmers' markets. It looks to me that if I buy the same amount of food in small amounts at farmers' markets as we get from the CSA, I'd pay a lot more. However, I wouldn't buy that much because it isn't working for us. It seems like the best options would be to either skip the CSA completely and make a regular weekly farmer's market trip to supplement whatever our garden isn't producing or to find a CSA with only kid-friendly, picky-adult friendly vegetables with relatively small boxes. The only place I've seen that lets people pick out their own food is too far of a drive to do weekly. The biggest draw to my current CSA is its long season -- I believe there are 30 deliveries running early May to late December or January. The farm is 200 miles away (so we haven't gone to visit, something else I'd like the opportunity to do) in southwestern Wisconsin. I have liked the fruit deliveries, especially since we stopped getting winter fruit (which ran high in not-kid-friendly stuff). But $80/month for organic fruit is excessive. I can get a lot of you-picked berries and apples and add bananas, peaches, pears and others from other sources for less money.
Has anyone quit a CSA and continued eating local, seasonal veggies? What vegetable-buying method works best for your family?
