Winter CSA Basics: Bringing the Seasons into Balance
This will be our tenth winter running a winter CSA at the Intervale Community Farm in Burlington, VT, and every year I have been amazed at the enthusiasm our farm members have for winter crops. There is a glaring, fundamental difference between summer and winter shares: in the summer, things start light and slow—salad greens give way to hardier greens, then come zucchini and cucumbers, then the first tomatoes, and the arc of summer begins to peak with melons and sweet corn and eggplant and peppers, and then the creamy fall vegetables fill the tables: squash and carrots and potatoes. By the final summer CSA pickup in early November, I feel like our members have watched us perform in all our own varying colors of the season, watched us smile on crisp summer days, groan with humidity and mosquitoes, bend and lift boxes over, and dash around with the mania of the season. There is an intimacy that develops as each week they come to experience whatever we’ve managed to harvest from the earth.
But the winter share is a different story. For the first several weeks, many of the crops are still harvested for the shares. We pick kale, leeks, Brussels sprouts and other greens for as long as the weather allows. But by January, the weather has usually halted any fresh harvests beyond what we are growing in our high tunnels. The bulk of the share is squash, cabbage, and a wide variety of roots. And the vegetables are remarkable in quality, flavor, color, and texture. However, regardless of how well we are able to store the crops, the truth of the matter is that each week the vegetables are a little less fresh and vibrant. We can’t re-create the arc and glory of the summer share. Instead, it feels like a slow decline, a grasping at something that we want to be so vital, but we can’t fight the fundamental truth of winter in Vermont. The season ends, things die, and the cycle of life needs to pause before we sow seeds again in March. But our markets and “eat local” bellies have us pushing hard against nature, and thus we have developed a winter share that is relatively successful at staving off the winter food doldrums. Here are a few key elements to our success and the path that led us there.
Storage Quality and Crop Diversity
The core of our winter share is based on a trio of “roots choice”, winter squash, and cabbage. Our members come every other week for nine weeks, which gives them an 18 week spread of produce. We try to provide them with enough food for that two week stretch, but not so much that they can’t store it comfortably at home. The formula that has seemed to work for us is the following:
- We offer one winter share size. Many members split it between two families.
- Each week, they get 10-12 pounds of a “roots choice” one, sometimes two, butternut squash, one head of cabbage (choice of red, Napa, or green), and a selection of whatever greens are available, usually between ¼ to ½ pound of fresh spinach.
- We make sure that we grow enough roots to always have carrots, onions, and potatoes available. We generally have a full season supply of the following as well: beets, rutabaga, celeriac and then partial seasons of turnips, daikon radish, kohlrabi and various other oddball roots.
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