Starting a school CSA

I’m thrilled to share a guest post from my friend and colleague, Christina, who writes about starting a CSA program (community supported agriculture) at the public middle school where she is a teacher:

Swiss chard at the school CSA from Monkshood

Food and school both play a big role in my life so it is not surprising that I spend a good deal of time thinking about both. I have already found a couple of ways to marry the two in a school garden and a healthy lunch program. This year I have been working on a third way to bring better food to our school, a CSA. For anyone not familiar, CSA stands for community supported agriculture and is also known as a “farm share”.

In starting the CSA, my hopes went beyond just connecting people to food, I wanted to connect people to people. I felt that this was a unique opportunity to bring together people who rarely have contact with one another, but have plenty in common. I envisioned students coming in to pick up their family’s vegetables, parents and teachers swapping recipes, and everyone eating healthier by increasing the variety and amount of fresh vegetables they eat.

French breakfast radish at the 

school CSA from Monkshood 

So far, the experience has been all that I hoped for. I get to hear people gushing about their vegetables and all the wonderful recipes they are trying out. Both teachers and district parents bring their children, who are happy to point out what vegetable each bin contains. Teachers from different buildings are getting to know one another, and I am getting to know everyone!

An additional benefit of the CSA is that it improves the quality of food available to people in need in our area.  Any left overs, or shares that people do not pick up are donated to a local food bank. While the food bank is a recipient of a good deal of dry goods, patrons do not otherwise get any fresh produce.

Since it was my first time orchestrating something like this, I looked for help. Just Food, a NYC based organization that works to connect farmers to consumers in the city, proved to be a great resource, even though my school is located outside of NYC. They offer free workshops on how to start a CSA and connected me with the farmer from Monskhood Nursery in upstate NY. I am hoping to work with the farm over the summer to get certification to accept SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that used to be called food stamps) so that shares will be an option for people from a greater variety of economic means.

Some people questioned why I did not work with a more local farm since there are several nearby that have CSAs. Although I am certainly a big proponent of supporting local farmers, I was even more interested in creating something uniquely ours. The local farms already have CSAs with pick-up at their farms.  I thought it was more important to work with a farm that would deliver the CSA shares weekly to my school so that parents, teachers and staff in my school district would have an opportunity to connect with each other at school. My hope is that as the CSA grows, each of the elementary schools will start their own, and we can start to partner with more local growers.

(This post was shared on Green Thumb Thursday and Healthy, Happy, Green & Natural Party Hop.)

Harvesting and planting more

Yesterday I went out to pick some basil leaves to have with dinner, and I discovered a handful of Cascadian snap peas were ready to be picked!  

 

Cascadian snap pea

I'm glad the peas are ready, because it's almost time to stop picking the asparagus.
Although this week we had no shortage of asparagus:

lots of asparagus this week

More lettuce, asparagus, strawberries and cilantro.

Today I harvested more peas, strawberries,
chives, cilantro, and lots of kale.

Aside from the basil which I planted from seed this spring, everything else that I harvested this week was either a perennial that I planted in a previous year (asparagus, strawberries, chives) or a volunteer that seeded itself from plants that went to seed last year (lettuce, kale, cilantro).

This week, the Reduce Footprints Change the World Wednesdays challenge (#CTWW) is to plant some food.   I decided to plant some of the bean and squash seed that I saved from last year.  

Black beans saved from last year, still in their pods.

A mixture of beans I saved including black beans and scarlet runner beans. 

Butternut squash seed saved from a particularly delicious squash.

 I planted the bean seeds along the fence where the peas are now so they'll have something to climb, and I planted two kinds of squash in small hills of compost right next to the beans - sort of a modified three sisters garden minus the corn.

compost hill

I encourage you to plant some food for the Change the World Wednesdays challenge and to check out the wonderful harvests at Daphne's Dandelions.  

 Elsewhere in the garden, the roses are in bloom along with foxglove, columbine, geraniums, irises, oxalis, forget-me-nots, bleeding heart, peonies, and more!

oxalis

geranium

columbine

foxglove

(This post was also shared on Healthy, Happy, Green & Natural Party Hop.)

Harvest Monday

This week I've been harvesting a lot of asparagus, kale and chives.  

Asparagus,  kale, and chives from the garden

To the kitchen

Straight into a frittata.  Very yummy!

Also, we had some lettuce

in a salad with chives

And, our first garden strawberries of the year!

I'm happy to have discovered Harvest Mondays at Daphne's Dandelions, where we can share what we are harvesting each week.  Some of the posts are beautiful - take a look.

Weeds – if you can’t beat them, eat them! Local foraging for dandelion greens and garlic mustard.

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about the nutritional value of eating weeds such as garlic mustard, dandelions and other weeds that are abundant.  They are supposedly ultra-healthy and packed with lots of nutrients.  Having no shortage of dandelions on my property, I decided to give it a go.

When weeding becomes foraging, there is a complete change in perspective.  No longer are weeds nuisances; instead they become prizes to be collected.  I find this mindset refreshing!

Homegrown Common Dandelion
(Taraxacum officinale)
that I subsequently harvested.

Washing dandelion greens in a salad spinner

We ate the dandelion greens in a salad and also in sandwiches.  The verdict:  not as bitter as we were expecting.   They made a nice addition to the salad, but we liked having them mixed with milder greens.  In a sandwich, they were fine on their own as the sole greens.  

Weed greens are usually more bitter/strong flavored than your average salad green.  Many greens such as lettuce are mild in the early spring and become more bitter as weather warms up and the plants bolt.  I suspect this may also be the case with dandelion leave - that the spring leaves will be milder than those harvested in summer.  If anyone can attest to this, please let me know.  

Eating locally grown foods is available to many people who might have thought otherwise.  If you have some weeds growing near you, they very well may be edible. A great resource for finding out more about foraging for and preparing edible weeds such as dandelion leaves is Wildman Steve Brill's website.

Another abundant weed to try is Garlic Mustard (Alliaria officinalis).  Garlic Mustard, originally from Europe, can be invasive here in the northeast US.   It is a biennial- meaning it lives for two years.  The first year it grows as a basal rosette.  After overwintering, it sends up a tall shoot and flowers  the second year.  Often year-one plants and year-two plants will be found next to each other.

A whole bunch of Garlic Mustard

 Garlic Mustard rosette

One popular way to eat garlic mustard is as pesto.  Google "garlic mustard pesto" and you'll pull up pages of recipes.   Most involve substituting garlic mustard greens for  basil leaves in a basic basil pesto recipe.  Some recipes also use walnuts in place of the traditional pine nuts,  and some omit the garlic or use some garlic mustard taproot in place of garlic.  Here is one example to try:

Garlic Mustard Pesto

Makes about 1 cup

4 cups garlic mustard greens

1/2 cup toasted walnuts

1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Fine sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Have you ever foraged for weeds?  Let me know if you have a favorite way to eat them.

(This post was shared on Tuesdays with a Twist and Healthy, Happy, Green & Natural Party Hop.)

Today in the garden: The chives are coming up & we ate some for dinner – our first homegrown food this year!

If you don’t already grow chives (Allium schoenoprasum), let me encourage you to grow some.  Chives are for you whether you’re a novice gardener,  a green thumb, an "I really should try growing something this year" kind of person, or an "I once tried to garden and it didn't work" kind of person. Just find a corner and plant some.

Chives are a mild member of the onion family.  They taste great in salads, in soups, and with bagels and cream cheese.  You can use them in any recipe that calls for scallions or add them to scrambled eggs. 

Young spring chives are especially tasty.  It’s as if all the chiveyness, the chive taste, has been concentrated in a smaller volume. Tonight I added some to our dinner:  spinach burritos (a la Moosewood Restaurant Simple Suppers).  In the summer when chives bloom, you can even eat the chive flowers! 

The great thing about growing chives here in Westchester County, NY, is that chives essentially require no care whatsoever.  They don’t need special soil. They don’t need to be protected from animals.  Most years they don’t need to be watered at all (once they’ve been established, that is).  In my yard, deer, rabbits, woodchucks, squirrels, etc. leave the chives alone.   Chives can be harvested from early spring all the way through fall.  Some folks like to harvest them with scissors.  I generally just break them off with my thumb and finger.  As long as an inch or so of the plant is left above ground, it will grow back again. 

The easiest way to start growing chives is to find someone who is already growing them and who is willing to share.  There tends to be a culture of sharing among gardeners because plants like chives multiply each year.  I have two large patches of chives that started from a small bunch that my mom gave me years ago.  Since then, I in turn have given out small bunches to anyone who wants some.  Chives can also be started from seeds outdoors once the soil warms up.

Do you have a favorite way to eat chives?  If you already grow chives, have yours come up yet?  

Imagine if suburban gardening crews created organic farms on their customers’ lawns

Imagine if instead of hiring gardeners to mow their lawns each week, suburbanites could hire gardeners to come and grow food on all or a portion of their property.

What do you think?

It would probably be quieter and less polluting than using lawn mowers, weed-wackers and leaf blowers.  Different plans could be available– the pick-your-own plan where gardeners plant and weed, but let the homeowners have the fun of harvesting, or the full service plan, where gardeners plant, weed, harvest and leave the fruits and veggies in a basket by the door.

While some of us (including me!) love to grow our own food, other people don’t have the time and/or inclination to garden.   Wouldn't it be great to give folks an option that was just as easy and convenient as hiring gardeners to tend their lawn?