Member Shares Available!

It’s begun! We’ve got seeds germinating under grow lights in our basement and we are now accepting members for the 2012 season of Backyard Farms Urban CSA!

A share for the season (24 weeks) costs only $10 a week, which means you pay $240  in the spring and receive a weekly bag of vegetables from the end of May through the beginning of November. Our shares are smaller than typical CSAs, perfect for an individual or couple, or for a family who wants to have their basic greens needs covered each week!

A typical share includes:
- salad greens
-cooking greens
-herbs
-seasonal goodie such as a bag of spinach, bunch of scallions, or bunch of carrots                    and an optional sourdough bread share

Pick-Up Day: Tuesdays from 4-7 pm at Sidewalk Ends Farm (47 Harrison Street, one block east of Armory Park)

Dates: First pick-up is Tuesday, May 29, 2012. The last pick-up is Tuesday, November 6, 2012 (Election Day!)

Email us at backyardfarmscsa@gmail.com to sign up or for more information!

Carrot harvest

Today we’re bringing carrots to our CSA! We grew a whole bunch (14 bunches!) of heirloom carrots, and they all thrived in the beautiful soil at the garden on Bowdoin Street. Cosmic purples, red cored chantennays, atomic reds, napolis, and scarlet Nantes are among the varieties that we pulled out of the ground this morning. We have more for the market next week, too, which we’re leaving in the ground to get bigger. And of course we’re celebrating the harvest with carrot salad for lunch…for quality control purposes

Laura Lamb and Backyard Farms in EcoRI

http://www.ecori.org/this-weeks-news-from-the-farme/2011/7/18/little-city-growers-has-tiny-carbon-footprint.html

Garlic Harvest

We harvested the rest of our garlic today: a real bounty. We’ll hang it ip to cure in the next few days. The soft neck variety can be braided and hung to cure, and it’s so pretty that way. Those ones we’ll probably cure in our kitchens. Unfortunately we don’t have enough to bring garlic to market, but our CSA members will definitely see some of these beautiful, delicious heads a little later in the season

Elephant Garlic

The greens on our elephant garlic plants are turning brown and toppling over…looks like they’re about ready to come out of the ground! Though we got much of our garlic seed as a gift from the generous and talented Maine garlic farmer Jon Thurston, the elephant garlic is a variety that Than picked up in sunny CA. We’re not sure quite how well it adjusted to the climate here, but we’re excited to pull it and see. This head looks all right, if a little small. Stay tuned.

“Harbinger Zukes”

Hopefully this means zucchini will abound next week. Everybody: dust off your grills, loaf pans, casserole dishes, and cast iron skillets, cause we’ve all got one way tickets to Zucchiniville, Courgette-ington!

Knee High by the Fourth of July

Wow, what a wonderful and exhausting time of the year. Proud and exhausted most of the time at Front Step, but lots of time to think since I work alone most of the time. We are the first and only urban farm CSA in Providence, and that is pretty awesome and unique. A couple of conversations this week got me thinking about the value of what we do, and I wanted to put out a couple ideas.

We are charging a market value for our CSA produce, meaning that you get the same price on our veggies if you join the CSA as you do if you come to the farmers market. We charge on the higher end for our produce because we believe that we deserve to make a living wage- always aiming for 10 dollars an hour. We don’t hit that goal. Ever. But the CSA allows us to get closer, and to not totally  burn ourselves out going up against land insecurity (the farm is up for sale once again!), freak hail storms (90 mile an hour winds and half an hour of marble sized hail ruined one market for us and ruined our crops for the next two), disease and pests. And then it rained again at the farmers market and no one came the week our produce had finally bounced back from a death by a trillion ice balls. Three out of five markets were busts.

Through it all our lovely CSA members allowed us to pay our rents and utilities for the crazy month of June. We are incredibly grateful and devoted to our members and spend more time planting and thinking of how we are going to pick and bag and grow a healthy CSA share that delivers on our promise of high quality fresh salad, greens and culinary herbs while throwing in some odds and ends that give you a sense of how a farm season works. We are working FOR and WITH our members to support ourselves. We are the only farms doing this on a micro scale and in the City.  July will be crazy and so will August and September but we are tired and happy to be working on this project and getting to know our members.

 

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