With the start of the greenhouse planting this past week I won’t see my fingernails this clean until November.
First of all I sent every member an email asking for your opinion on why someone should join a CSA farm. The information gathered from the survey will be used in a talk I am giving in April to prospective CSA members. Your response is greatly appreciated. If you didn’t receive the email check your spam filter and if it isn’t there let me know and we will check to make sure we have the right email address on file.
Second, FruitShare pricing for the summer/fall is available. This season we will have nine boxes of fruit spread over the course of the 19 week season. This is all certified organic fruit from wonderful, small family orchards around the country. The price for 2013 is $436. Details can be found on our web site. If you’d like to add fruit to your account please let me know!
Third, we are taking orders for all our “shares” including but not limited to (wait, maybe it is limited to) meat, cheese, fruit, coffee, flowers, winter, and salmon. Plus you can buy herb six packs as well!
Fourth, speaking of SalmonShare: We have to meet a minimum order to make this work. If everyone who expressed interest in SalmonShare would purchase the full size share we’d be set. I realize it is money and it could be a lot of salmon for two people but it comes frozen and will last into the winter when wild, line-caught salmon is no longer available. And we need our omega-3s all winter long! Consider adding a full share to your veggies!
Fifth, as we all know, Fresh Earth Farms is a pure Community Supported Agriculture farm. This means we give all the produce we grow to our members – there is no contention from other sales channels like wholesale or farmers’ market. In addition to being a pure CSA farm we also believe that “Community Support” goes both ways. As such we do things like donate excess produce to local food shelves and hire only local Twin City residents. Last season we added another way to support the community when we donated a CoupleShare to Afton-Lakeland Elementary School – the localist school to our farm and the school our youngest child attends. This year we upped our donation shares to local schools by 200%! It always seems like a lot when you use percentages. This year we added St. Croix Montessori School in Stillwater and Liberty Ridge Elementary School in Woodbury. Our hope for this program is three-fold. First is to give these schools some much needed dollars to cover the cost of educating the children who’ll one day take over from us old folks. The second is our hope that by giving something nutritious it will spur families to start eating healthy food – perhaps a subtle reminder that much of the crap we feed our kids is not food. And third, it is our long term strategy to get the youngsters to eat the kinds of food we grow so that when they grow grow-up they feed their children nutritious food as well. We stole this idea from McDonalds – except we added the nutritious food part. Hopefully these donations will fulfill all these aspirations.
Sixth, we still have shares so please spread the word!
Seventh, payment for your shares is due this month. If you’d like to pay over time please contact me for a payment plan.
Eighth, one thing that is available to our members, and I don’t know if I ever mentioned it before, is that if you pick-up at one of our drop sites but for whatever reason know you won’t be able to in a given week you are more than welcome to pick-up at the farm that week. I was reminded of this when reviewing the answers to the survey and someone mentioned one of the drawbacks is their pick-up day wasn’t always convenient. Anyway, the bottom line is if you want to make a run out to the farm you are more than welcome to do so – we aren’t that far away; just let us know ahead of time so we can plan accordingly. Of course on-farm pick-up members are free to move to another day as necessary; again just let us know ahead of time so we can harvest accordingly.
Ninth, we now have a Google Calendar on our web site with all the events, pick-up days, delivery days, etc. If anyone wants to try it out to copy the events to your calendar please give it a test and let me know if it works.
Tenth, maybe that should be it for this newsletter. A lot of information to share. One of these days maybe I can write something that isn’t so important.