July 19
Hooray for CSA! This is the first summer that I’ve signed up for a CSA box (i.e. Community Shared Agriculture). How it works is that at the beginning of the season you purchase a portion of a local farmer’s produce and you get one box a week of whatever is fresh and ready to go for the entire growing season. I can’t tell you how excited I was to start getting the deliveries. Besides the fact that I would have fresh produce at my fingertips all summer long, I couldn’t wait to get some vegetables that I wouldn’t normally buy myself and have to come up with some recipes on the fly. Unfortunately, our deliveries were slightly delayed because a freak hail storm destroyed a lot of our farmer’s crops mid-June. It’s amazing how much damage 20 minutes of hail can do! It was a real reminder that nature actually dictates how a harvest will fare, which was easy for me to forget when I’m just buying imported goods from the supermarket most of the year. Luckily, they recovered well and I just picked up my second box yesterday.