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The Land Over The Fence: How One New Yorker Moved To The Midwest And Built Her Urban Farm
There’s a stereotype about New Yorkers that we can’t see west past the Hudson River. When I moved here, my family repeatedly asked if I was warm enough and offered to send extra blankets despite the fact that I was just two states away
Reader Contribution By Jodi Kushins, Over the Fence Urban Farm
9/16/2019
I spent the bulk of my childhood and young adult years in metro New York. The daughter of two hard-working physicians, I wasn’t born to be a farmer. And still, I’m sitting here today with dirt under my fingernails and a to-do list that includes water the seedbed, harvest tomatoes, and clean the coop.
In 2003, I moved to Columbus, Ohio, to attend graduate school at Ohio State University (OSU). OSU is so big it has its own zip code. So, while I never lived on campus, it was the center of my world. I didn’t consider myself a resident of the city as much as the university. All that changed when I graduated and decided to make Ohio my home.
There’s a stereotype about New Yorkers that we can’t see west past the Hudson River. When I moved here, my family repeatedly asked if I was warm enough and offered to send extra blankets despite the fact that I was just two states away. I had driven across the country once or twice by then, but I never really got out beside the National Parks and big cities. I had no sense of life in the Midwest before I got here beyond the faint notion that people worked hard and they grew things.
What I learned was that Columbus is a city where people make things and make things happen. Ideas take root here and people support and celebrate the pursuits of their friends and neighbors. Perhaps there are lots of places like Columbus. I hope so.
Finding Land and Taking Advice
The land Over the Fence, November 2013. Photo by Jodi Kushins
When I met him in 2005, my husband was living in a house he bought from his grandmother; the house his mother grew up in. His grandfather had kept a large kitchen garden out back and his grandmother had a canning station in the basement. Dan was also an avid gardener, but he had two kids, a dog, and a job and was trying to keep it all together. Together we slowly resurrected his grandfather’s corner of the yard.
I took advice from a wide range of sources. One friend encouraged me to keep on top of weeds before they became a problem. One extolled the importance of watering, deeply and regularly. Another taught me how to lift sod and soon our backyard was transformed from a patch of crabgrass to an ever-evolving menagerie of flowering and fruiting trees and shrubs. I subscribed to MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazine and I read about backyard sharing. And by 2013, we devised a plan to increase our space.
Over the fence from our garden sat a patch of land that was rarely walked on other than the person who mowed it. Our kids played back there from time to time, but our neighbor on that side was elderly and it was more than she needed. I devised a plan to lease the land from her but just as I was preparing to approach her, she had a bad fall and was moved to an assisted living facility.
When her children were ready to sell the house, Dan and I bought it with the intention of turning the yard into an urban farm and the house into a rental property. In a twist of fate, his parents wound up moving in and we have all enjoyed the inter-generational proximity, to one another and to the land.
Starting an Urban CSA
In full bloom, August 2017. Photo by Jodi Kushins
I will never forget how we took possession of the house one day and rented a sod lifter the next. After initial amending and tilling, we planted our first crop of garlic (about 100 feet) that week, and it was the best decision we could have made. A few months later, the farm was bursting with new growth. Those initial beds served as our beacon. We had already done something right.
Over that winter, I reached out to our family and friends with invitations to join our CSA. We got a small group of supporters, enough to help us pay for start-up supplies. Our first season was more successful than I could have imagined. We had tons of help from our members establishing beds and tending plants throughout the season.
We’ve had high points and low since then. The weather is a never-ending source of aggravation and sometimes wrangling folks to work feels a lot like herding cats. But I get out there every day and find something to marvel at, something to nibble, something to question.
When we started the project I hesitated to call it a farm or myself a farmer. Six seasons later, it feels like home.
Photos by Jodi Kushins
Jodi Kushins owns and operates Over the Fence Urban Farm, a cooperatively maintained, community-supported agricultural project located in Columbus, Ohio. The farm, founded in 2013, is an experiment in creative placemaking, an outgrowth of Jodi’s training as an artist, teacher, and researcher. Connect with Jodi on Facebook and Instagram, and read all of her MOTHER EARTH NEWS posts here.
Tags: urban homesteading, urban agriculture, community supported agriculture, placemaking, Ohio, Jodi Kushins,
Farmland Is Vanishing, And Old Agricultural Practices Are Dying. Local Innovators Are Looking For The Future of Farming.
With Papa Spuds, which delivers more than two hundred products to households throughout the region, customers can select fruits, vegetables, meats, and other locally sourced foods—even custom-ordering recipe kits the way you might with a meal-planning service like Blue Apron
BY ANDREA RICE, MELISSA MCGOVERN
August 27, 2019
Jade Wilson
Vera Fabian, a co-owner of Ten Mothers Farm in Cedar Grove
Raleigh native Rob Meyer says he took inspiration from the local food supply chains he observed in Ecuador while working with the Peace Corps when he founded the online delivery service Papa Spuds in 2008. Ecuadorian families support each other’s businesses, he says, selling food and homemade goods at community markets. He wanted to build a similar model in the Triangle.
With Papa Spuds, which delivers more than two hundred products to households throughout the region, customers can select fruits, vegetables, meats, and other locally sourced foods—even custom-ordering recipe kits the way you might with a meal-planning service like Blue Apron.
This is a form of community-supported agriculture, or CSA, an emerging model designed to create a direct line between farmers and consumers. Based on what’s in season or abundance, most CSAs offer boxes of pre-selected produce for consumers to pick up weekly or biweekly at a designated location (some, like Papa Spuds, deliver). There are about twenty-five hundred CSAs around the country, including about a hundred in North Carolina—among them Infinity Hundred Urban Farms in Raleigh, Maple Spring Gardens in Cedar Grove, In Good Heart Farm in Pittsboro, and Transplanting Traditions Community Farm in Chapel Hill.
Their goal is to create a more localized—and thus sustainable—food system that works for farmers, consumers, and the environment.
“People need to start caring more about the local land,” says Vera Fabian, a co-owner of Ten Mothers Farm in Cedar Grove, who previously ran the CSA program at Transplanting Traditions.
The old system is no longer viable. Farmland is vanishing. During a twenty-year period from 1992–2012, the American Farmland Trust documented some thirty-one million acres of farmland lost to urban and rural development. In North Carolina, the average farmer is sixty years old, according to a 2017 agricultural census; nationally, there are six times as many farmers over age sixty-five as there are under thirty-five. In the near future, many of today’s farmers will fund their retirements by selling their land to developers. Their large legacy farms, which have in some cases raised livestock and commodity crops for generations, will vanish.
There are lots of factors at play, but the bottom line is that, for new farmers, margins are tighter than they used to be. Land costs are rising, and unpredictable weather patterns associated with climate change are reducing crop yields.
CSAs allow farmers to reduce packaging and transportation costs, which puts more money back in their pockets. Fabian says she’s seen a trend of younger farmers developing smaller operations with less overhead and less risk, much like the one-acre farm she and Gordon Jenkins started in 2015. CSA programs enable them to leverage support from their communities in ways bigger farms can’t.
This, she says, may be the future of farming.
But a sustainable supply chain will also require us to throw away less food away. Nearly a third of all food produced around the world, and half produced in the U.S., ends up in a landfill. Farms account for some of this waste—less than 20 percent—but the bulk comes at the consumer level, from households to restaurants to grocery stores that toss “defective” produce.
Here again, innovators are tackling this problem in creative ways.
In June, the five-year-old Baltimore-based company Hungry Harvest—a recipient of a $100,000 prize on the TV show Shark Tank—which repurposes food that would have otherwise been discarded, merged with the Durham-based produce-delivery service Ungraded Produce. The company, which has locations in Raleigh, Detroit, New York City, Miami, and other big cities, encourages farmers and growers to embrace the idea that a bruised peach or apple is still valuable—and edible—and delivers these imperfect products to consumers.
Most grocery store chains don’t accept suboptimal produce, so farmers don’t bother harvesting these fruits and vegetables but instead till them back into the soil to recycle their nutrients. For many farmers, the so-called ugly produce movement might seem like a fad; for their livelihoods, it’s far less consequential than rising land costs and declining crop yields.
Still, these things go together: Reducing farm waste and stimulating the local food economy is one small step in rethinking how we produce what we eat and decrease the carbon footprint it leaves behind. And in the process, we might just make farming a viable enterprise again.
Comment on this story at food@indyweek.com.
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TAGS
FARMING COMMUNITY-SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE TEN MOTHERS FARM FOOD UNGRADED PRODUCE AGRICULTURE HUNGRY HARVEST
New City Map Shows Farm-Fresh Produce In Queens, New York
Fresh produce can sometimes be hard to find in many underserved New York City neighborhoods. That is why City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, the acting public advocate, created an interactive Farm-To-City Food map of the five boroughs, highlighting the importance of access to fresh and healthy food for all New Yorkers.
In Queens, the map shows 17 Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), 20 farmers markets, 2 food boxes and 4 fresh pantry projects.
Source: qns.com
CSAs are partnerships between a farm and a community that allow neighbors to invest in the farm at the beginning of the growing season when farms need support the most, in exchange for weekly distribution of the farms’ produce from June to November. Food Box programs aggregate produce from participating farms and enable under-served communities to purchase a box of fresh, healthy, primarily regionally-grown produce.
Source: qns.com
City Roots Owners Talk About Their Decision To Downsize
Urban Farm Gets Back to Its Roots.
By Bach Pham
Sep 26, 2018
Bach Pham
There was a sense of calm between City Roots owners Robbie and Eric McClam as they worked on the field at the farm last week, preparing for the Glass Half Full Festival. After a busy first half of the year, the quiet moment was a welcome turn for the father and son.
The change came by choice.
Founded more than a decade ago, City Roots occupies a few acres in Columbia’s Rosewood neighborhood, near the Hamilton-Owens Airport. But recently, the community-minded urban farm began growing faster, expanding production at a second site.
“This past winter and spring we were scaling the farm from three acres to about an additional 30 acres to which we were planting a dozen or so acres of vegetables,” says Eric McClam. “We basically had five farms: a microgreen farm, a mushroom farm, a flower farm, a vegetable farm, and an agrotourism farm spread across two locations, 15-20 minutes apart. That was fun and exciting, but had its own new set of challenges.”
The size and scope of the changes was immediately felt. City Roots was branching in several directions with production, and struggling to make it all connect.
“We had over 200 different things we were growing between the farms,” Eric says. “No one can do 200 things well.”
The complexity of the farm’s rapid growth brought as many technical issues as it did benefits. City Roots was doing everything: growing, processing and delivering to local restaurants in Columbia and food hubs in Atlanta, Greenville and Charleston nearly every day of the week.
“We had three deliveries going on a day at one time on some occasions,” Robbie says. “We had vans in the shop, car repairs all the time.”
The breaking point hit over the summer when Eric fell ill and was forced to take some time off.
“What precipitated the scaling back and hard look at everything was I literally got shingles from stress this summer and had to stay home for a period of time,” says Eric. “While at home, I had time to take a hard look at what was holding that stress and recognizing that it was the diversity and scale of the farm. Everybody has a grounding moment in their life and says, ‘OK, what is important to me?’ The farm and family are important.
“So after making the hard decisions, we scaled it back to fit what works well for the farm. We recognized that getting better at what we do well and letting go of things that were painful to let go, especially reducing staff — some of whom had been here for many years — was something necessary for the direction of the business.”
Eric calls the decision to lay off employees “the hardest decision.” The farm went from 23 employees to about 15.
“We hope we are still in a good place with everyone. We just didn’t have the ability to retain them. We had to be nimble and change course. My role as the head farmer is to steer the ship. We were heading for a ditch, and we needed to get back on course.”
The McClams made several major changes in the past few months. Production at their second site was halted, and the community supported agriculture (CSA) program was cut.
“When we first started, the CSA was exciting and a good business model for us,” says Eric. “We never could quite get the volume of CSA we needed to make that diversified larger scale work, though. … We realized that we’re better suited to do a variety of things and bringing those to market and doing it that way.”
While the field side of the farm struggled to find the right identity, two parts of the farm actually have grown over the years: microgreen and mushroom production.
Microgreens went from being a small portion of the farm in the beginning to quickly becoming the biggest component of City Roots, seen not just in Columbia, but everywhere in the South from menus in Charleston to shelves in every Whole Foods in the Southeast.
“A lot of people grow organic vegetables, but not a lot of people grow microgreens and mushrooms,” says Eric. “Those are what we’re most known for, that’s our niche market and what works really well for us.”
City Roots plans to shift their focus to sharpening their microgreen and mushroom production, maintaining some small-scale flower production, and simply putting more time into the urban farm itself.
“We’re going to be putting more landscaping around the farm, more shrubs and trees, making the farm a prettier place and improving it as an event venue,” Eric says. “I’m excited about putting more emphasis here at the home farm and getting back to the roots at City Roots.”
Eric still plans to maintain the educational aspect of the farm. This year they doubled the number of school tours from last year, and plan to continue finding ways to share the farm with the community. They have also been exploring pickling, dedicating a portion of the farm to growing root vegetables and plants like ginger to contribute towards different recipes to sell at the farm.
There is still hope to do some large-scale gardening, especially with one particular product that has become a much-talked about agricultural item: hemp. The farm applied for the industrial hemp pilot program run by the South Carolina Department of Agriculture and is currently in the running to be one of the 40 farms certified to grow hemp in South Carolina.
“We are excited about that potential,” says Eric. “It’s a new niche market that we see a lot of potential for growth.”
5 Urban Farms Around The U.S. Changing Their Communities For The Better
In abandoned lots, in parks, on rooftops, and even in hospitals, urban farming is thriving.
BY KOTY NEELIS
In abandoned lots, in parks, on rooftops, and even in hospitals, urban farming is thriving. As more people want to know where their food comes from, community leaders across the country are seeking creative ways to grow fresh produce for residents in their city. But urban agricultural does more than just provide access to locally grown food — it boosts economic growth, lowers carbon emissions, and tackles issues surrounding environmental degradation, public health, poverty, and more by giving people greater control over the food system.
From quarter-acre farms run by elementary students to green roof gardens feeding thousands, here are a few urban farming projects aiming to make their community a better place.
1. Detroit Dirt
Detroit Dirt's mission is to create a zero-waste mindset throughout communities and drive forward a low-carbon economy. It's a compost company that helps complete the “circle of life” in food production by regenerating waste into resources. Pashon Murray, the leader behind the composting revolution in Detroit, is diverting tens of thousands of tons of food waste a year away from landfills and into a closed-loop composting system Murray built entirely from the ground up.
2. Boston Medical Center
As more hospitals move towards growing their own food for their patients and the community, one New England hospital has become a leader in this movement by placing a farm right on the hospital's rooftop. Boston Medical Center is not only the largest rooftop farm in Boston, but it's also first hospital-based rooftop farm in Massachusetts. The 7,000 square foot farm grows more than 25 crops and aims to generate 15,000 pounds of food every season, along with a couple of beehives to produce honey.
3. Ohio City Farm
Located in Cleveland, Ohio, Ohio City Farm is one of the largest contiguous urban farms in the United States. With over six acres, the farm aims to provide fresh, local, and healthy food to Cleveland’s underserved residents, while also boosting the local food economy and teaching the community about healthy eating. It's also home to Refugee Response, an employment training program that helps the city’s newest immigrants acquire the needed skills to succeed in their new communities by growing and selling organically farmed fresh produce
4. SAVOR…Chicago
Located on top of McCormick Place (the largest convention center in North America), this roof top farm is the largest soil-based rooftop farm in the Midwest, according to the Chicago Botanic Garden, which maintains the farm through its Windy City Harvest program. SAVOR serves about 3 million people a year at McCormick Place and has been recognized for its sustainability leadership and innovation including Green Seal Certification and International APEX certification in sustainability.
5. Acta Non Verba
Located in Oakland, CA, Acta Non Verba is a youth urban farm that's planned, planted, harvested, and sold by local elementary and middle school-aged kids. Founded and led mainly by women of color from the surrounding neighborhood and larger community, the quarter-acre nonprofit farm aims to challenge oppressive dynamics and environment with urban farming. ANV designs their monthly farm days, camps, and after-school program, so that young children have the opportunity to experience nature in a safe and welcoming green space, learning, creating, and accessing healthy, nature-based experiences that will empower them.
The World’s First “High-Tech Eco Village” Will Reinvent Suburbs
A half-hour commute from Amsterdam, a piece of farmland is slated to become a new kind of neighborhood. Vertical farms, along with traditional fields and orchards surrounding homes, will supply food to people living there. Food waste will turn into fish feed for on-site aquaculture. Houses will filter rainwater, but won’t have driveways. A “village OS” tech platform will use AI to simultaneously manage systems for renewable energy, food production, water supply, and waste.
The 50-acre neighborhood, which will be nearly self-sufficient as it collects and stores water and energy, grows food, and processes much of its own waste, was initially planned for construction in 2017. The developers, called ReGen Villages, struggled with red tape–the area, on a piece of land that used to be underwater but was reclaimed in the 1960s when a seawall was constructed–has regulations that make it difficult for someone other than an individual homeowner to build on land that is mostly used for farming now. But after the project finally got government approval this month, it’s ready to take its next steps.
![[Photo: ReGen Villages]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57c8695d5016e11e71be1d83/1534760237080-2520TS7R23O8T7ZR9D2M/eco+village-2.jpg)
[Photo: ReGen Villages]
“We can connect a neighborhood the way it’s supposed to be connected, which is around natural resources,” says James Ehrlich, founder of ReGen Villages. If the project raises the final funding needed to begin construction, what is now a simple field will have new canals, wetlands, and ponds that can soak up stormwater (the area is seven meters below sea level, and at risk for flooding) and attract migrating birds. The land will be planted with trees, gardens, and food forests. Vertical gardens inside greenhouses will grow food on a small footprint. The 203 new homes, from tiny houses and row houses to larger villas, will provide needed housing in an area where the population may double in 15 years. The houses range in cost from 200,000 to 850,000 euros.
As cities become increasingly expensive and crowded, Ehrlich believes that this type of development may become more common. “In the last few years, we’ve really seen that the market has shifted and that there’s a hollowing out of cities,” he says. “They are really expensive and the quality of life is going down, and as much as millennials or younger people really want to be in the city, the fact is that they can’t really afford it . . . the trends are really moving toward this kind of neighborhood development outside of cities.”
![[Photo: ReGen Villages]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57c8695d5016e11e71be1d83/1534760323234-E8PYCK6PT7ZLEV48UXZ5/eco+village-3.PNG)
[Photo: ReGen Villages]
There’s also a need to rethink infrastructure so it works more efficiently, with a lower environmental footprint. The new development considers everything–from electricity to sewage–as an interconnected system, and software links the pieces together. Electric cars, for example, which will be parked on the perimeter of the neighborhood to keep streets walkable, can store some of the extra power from the neighborhood’s solar panels and other renewable energy.
The neighborhood works differently than most. Because of the expected arrival of self-driving cars in coming years, and to encourage walking and biking, the houses aren’t designed with parking; a new bus line along the edge of the neighborhood, with a dedicated bus lane, can take residents to the town of Almere or into Amsterdam. (As in other parts of the Netherlands, separated bike paths also connect to the city.) Water will come primarily from rain collection. The on-site farming, including raising chicken and fish, will supply a large portion of the local food supply. If neighbors volunteer for the community–to garden, or teach a yoga class, or provide elder care, for example–the community will use a blockchain-based time bank to track their hours, and then provide a discount on their HOA fees.
![[Photo: ReGen Villages]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57c8695d5016e11e71be1d83/1534760367146-N6LO14QFMR1T625FFX3A/eco+village-4.jpg)
[Photo: ReGen Villages]
A “living machine,” a system that uses plants and trees to filter sewage, and a separate anaerobic digester, can handle the neighborhood’s sewage and provide irrigation or water reused in energy systems. A system for processing food and animal waste will use black soldier flies and aquatic worms to digest the waste and create both chicken and fish feed. Other household waste–like cans and bottles–will be handled by the municipal recycling system, at least initially.
It’s a design that Ehrlich believes is feasible elsewhere, though it may not easily fit into existing regulations, and it would need political support. (Some other “agrihoods,” neighborhoods with built-in farming, do already exist, like Kuwili Lani in Hawaii, which also uses renewable energy and harvests some rainwater.)
“We know that governments around the world are in a desperate situation to build probably over a billion new homes around the world,” he says. “It’s a terrible housing crisis. At the same time, they wrestle with a number of things: the commercial interest of farmers, the commercial interests of traditional real estate developers, material companies who have a way of doing things that they’ve been doing for 100, 150 years. Most of the rules on the books relate to this district-scale thinking–of grid-based electricity, of district-scale water, of district-scale sewage.”
Financing is another challenge: While typical real estate developers look for large rates of return and quick exits, ReGen Villages plans to stay involved in its developments and get long-term, single-digit returns. The company is still raising the last round of money needed for the new development. Because Almere has regulations that don’t allow for high density, the initial development will also be more expensive. But once it’s built–something that Ehrlich expects to happen in 2019–others can follow more quickly. “We have access to a lot of really big money that’s waiting for us to finish the next pilot, and so we need the proof of concept,” he says.
The company has plans to build future developments near cities like Lund, Sweden, and Lejre-Hvalso, Denmark, and it ultimately hopes to bring a low-cost version of the neighborhoods to developing countries. “We can imagine going to rural India, sub-Saharan Africa, where we know the next 2 [billion] to 3 billion people are coming to the planet, and where we know that hundreds of millions of people are moving into the middle class,” he says. “And [we want] to get there as quickly as we can to provide new kinds of suburbs, new kinds of neighborhoods.”
8 Memberships To Get Local, Farm-Fresh Veggies In Grand Rapids, Michigan, This Summer
AUSTIN LANGLOIS APRIL 14, 2018
8 Memberships To Get Local, Farm-Fresh Veggies In Grand Rapids, Michigan, This Summer
Turnip for what? For local fruits and veggies!
Did you know that Michigan produces more than 300 different agricultural products on a commercial basis, like blueberries, cherries, cucumbers and floriculture products?
If you’re looking for a convenient way get your hands on local produce while supporting local farmers, try out Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs or produce delivery services.
CSA programs are a unique way to get farm-fresh produce, and often overlooked — they’re basically the OG subscription service before it was a thing. In short, farmers devote a portion of their produce as “shares” to the public. A share is usually a box of produce, but it might also include other farm items like honey, eggs or meats. You buy a share (or a half share) and then you pick up your box of produce each week. The contents vary inside from week to week — so it’s a fun way to try to out new fruits and veggies. However, unlike regular subscription boxes, there’s a shared risk in joining a CSA. Paying upfront for the whole season means that if the weather is bad or crops don’t yield as much as expected, members aren’t usually refunded. As Local Harvest explains, “the result is a feeling of ‘we’re in this together.’”
BLACKBIRD FARMS
Coopersville-based Blackbird Farms has application forms for its CSA is up online. Produce can be picked up on Wednesday or Thursday evenings, and their season runs for 20-22 weeks, from June to October. $525 will get you a full share of produce. While the shares vary from week to week (weather and conditions depending), a large mid-season share might get you: One head of broccoli, two summer squash and zucchini, one bunch of beets, three peppers or two eggplants, one bunch of kale, one bunch of chard, two onions, one bunch parsley, cilantro, or dill, one kohlrabi, one head of lettuce, two tomatoes, one bunch basil and three pounds of potatoes. If you opt for a small share ($290), you’ll receive half of the large share. Deadline to register is May 31, 2018.
EARTHKEEPER FARM
Located north of town, Earthkeeper Farm offers a work share, where CSA members help out at a set time each week for a minimum of four hours (like in the field, harvesting or at the farmers market). In exchange, they receive a share of produce. The season runs from May-October. Contact Rachelle at rachelle@earthkeeperfarm.com for an application.
BLANDFORD NATURE CENTER
Did you know that your favorite nature center also offers a CSA? Blandford Farm has been growing chemical-free produce since 2010 in a 4,000-square-foot greenhouse. Their full-share (21 weeks of produce valued at $25) is the recommended size for a family, while the half-share is valued about $15 of produce a week (perfect for CSA newbies or couples). Prices vary depending on if you want to pick up your shares at the farm or a market — and Blandford Nature Center members get a discount on shares. The season runs from June to October. Deadline to register is June 4, 2018.
GREEN WAGON FARM
Green Wagon Farm, located in Ada, offers an extensive CSA program, from year-round to summer weekly or bi-weekly memberships. Choose from three different sizes (small: 4-6 veggies / medium: 8-10 veggies / large: 12-14 veggies). Green Wagon Farm features a unique “design-your-own-share” pick up, where members can choose from 15-20 vegetables and herbs based on a point system. Their summer season runs June to October.
NEW CITY FARM
New City Farm is an urban farm to provide job and life skills to local high school youth. They offer several different share options. Their main season runs from May 31 to Oct. 25, and you can extend your season by purchasing an additional share of produce from Nov. 1 to Dec. 13. One share not only gives you great local produce, but also it helps provide employment and training for 12 high school students. A 22-week full share costs $495 (good for a family of four) while a half-week share costs $295.
SCHULER FARMS
Based in Caledonia, Schuler Farms offers a 20-week CSA membership. Buying a share will get you organically grown produce from mid-May to the end of October. A full share is $550, while a half share rings in a $375. Opt to add eggs ($4.50) to cut out that extra grocery store run. Memberships are limited, and you can join by visiting their website.
MUD LAKE FARM
Mud Lake Farm features a unique Salad CSA, highlighting its 40+ varietals of hydroponically grown lettuce. Because they grow year-round, they add new member all year long. A $25 signup fee and $5 a week gets you a pound of lettuce a week from spring to fall. Winter shares are a little smaller as the lettuce grows slower and the heads are smaller. We love that you’re emailed monthly statements rather than requiring a large up-front cost. Sign up and learn more at their website.
DOORGANICS
For folks for whom the CSA model isn’t a fit, try a produce delivery service like Doorganics. They partner with more than 50 farmers and producers to deliver a wide range of organic fruits and vegetables in a weekly produce box. The menu is posted online (and on their new mobile app) each Thursday, and you can swap out produce for other choices (like if you don’t like carrots but you love blackberries). You can also add other products like breads, cheeses and meats. Choose from small, medium or large produce bins, or all-fruit or all-veggie bins. Prices range from $29.99 to $39.99.