Top 5 Words of Advice about CSA
It’s going to sound strange, but as a farmer, I’ve done my share of “mining” for gold — so to speak.
My boys are 8 and 5 years old, and whenever we go spend the night in a hotel, they always try to find “Goldrush” on the TV. (We don’t have cable at home).
They LOVE this show. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a reality-TV series that showcases gold-miners at work. They use these impressive machines called “dredgers” that dig the material, sift it (with an impressive water slue), and hopefully uncover golden nuggets of all shapes and sizes.
Sometimes they hit the jackpot. Sometimes they don’t.
Okay… segue to a question that will soon prove to be related…
Ever wonder what happens to those “end-of-year-customer-surveys” you fill out?
Well, customer surveys are kind of like Goldrush for farmers.
And Farmer Kurt and I created an especially powerful question in last year’s CSA customer survey that really gave us some “gold” to work with.
We asked our members to “give us three tips of advice they could share with incoming CSA members to help orient them to the CSA way of eating.”
What tricks did they use? What did they have to learn to do? What mistakes did they make?
What do they wish someone had told them before they started their CSA?
And so today’s blogpost is going to be all about their advice — a summary of the top 5 most common answers in that gold-rush customer survey.
There were actually a lot more words of wisdom shared — over 3 pages of material. But because I actually want you to finish this blogpost to the end, I’m not including all of it.
To see the entire list of CSA Advice for Rookies, download it here.
Ready to dive in?… Let’s go.
TIP #1: Learn how to store things the right way.
I heard this one a LOT. Specifically I heard TWO common storage mistakes people experienced.
Common Storage Mistake #1: “Take the tops off your carrots as soon as you can, or they’ll get soft.”
This is such a tragedy the first time it happens to you. You’re so excited to see those gorgeous carrots from Farmer Kurt — so beautiful — the highlight of the box. But if you neglect to take the green tops off within the first day, they will indeed turn rubbery soft.
Why does this happen?
The greens pull the moisture out of the root. So take the tops off the root, and then store the carrots in the fridge in a bag. (You can also keep the carrot tops and use them to make your own vegetable broth. Read our blogpost if you want to read more about that).
Common Storage Mistake #2: “Watch out for any green leafy thing. You need to eat those first, because they spoil quickly.”
You get a fair amount of “green, leafy things” in a CSA box or from a farmer’s market. Kale, chard, lettuce, beet greens, collards (if you’re adventurous), arugula, mesclun mix. You may have already discovered that their shelf life is limited. And the refrigerator likes to suck the moisture out of them.
I always put them into a Debbie Meyer Green bag to help them last longer. That seems to delay the inevitable by about 3 days. But you definitely learn which foods go bad the fastest in a CSA.
And if you value “not wasting food,” you’ll quickly learn how to adjust your eating patterns and meal planning so that the highly perishable items get consumed first.
Tip 2: Learn how to freeze things to use later in the winter. If you haven’t used it by day 4, freeze it.
You will undoubtedly fall prey to the inevitable veggie overload at some point in the CSA season. You start getting veggies faster than you can get rid of them.
Or if you’re new to CSA, sometimes you don’t know what to do with those unusual veggies. So you shove them in the fridge and tell yourself you’ll deal with them later.
And they stockpile.
Because of this survey result, I have built a specific mechanism to help teach this content to our CSA members in a very intentional way.
Each week, we’ll review what’s in your box and go over if and how you can freeze it through our live unboxing videos, as well as through a weekly PDF cheatsheet that comes with your box.
You’ll learn two of the most common ways to freeze veggies — “the simple bag and freeze” and the “blanch and bag” method. This exit strategy buys you time while you try to figure out what to do with your food.
Tip 3: Keep it simple — meal prep doesn’t have to be fancy or time consuming.
Be sure to store anything “leafy” into a Debbie Meyer Green Bag as soon as you get home.
I really resonated with this advice.
We can often feel this expectation that every night needs to be a gourmet 5-star meal, where we slave over our skillet and emerge at the dinner table with our faces dotted with flour.
But that just isn’t so.
Do we have CSA members who LOVE to cook and prep meals like this on a regular basis? Yes.
But we also have a LOT of members who have learned this gem of wisdom and keep it simple.
Veggies can be prepped quickly and taste good with just a few simple cooking methods: Bake, steam, sauce, roast, grill.
Take 10 more seconds to meal prep and add a few spices and you’ve got a meal worthy for any family dinner table.
The goal of CSA is to help you learn how to eat well using locally-sourced, seasonal food — and to do it simply, so your meals LOOK and TASTE like you slaved over them, but they’re really just quick and easy.
I think sometimes “Veggie Overwhelm” sets in and paralyzes us.
How many times 3 o’clock comes around and I still don’t have a plan for dinner. Opening my fridge can be overwhelming. I don’t know where to begin.
In our CSA, we teach you some tricks for how to deal with veggie overwhelm.
Specifically we share with you a kind of flowchart that I gleaned from my “gold-mining” that can help you get unstuck. When you’re feeling overwhelmed or unsure of what to make, you can take your veggies through this flowchart or grid and it will help you quickly see some possibilities for meal prep.
This grid has been a game-changer for me, and we share it as part of your CSA membership.
Tip 4: Try to learn the 3 basic uses of each veggie.
I LOVE this tip. I used this tip, and I know it works.
Although it’s true that CSA members may not initially know instinctively what to make with garlic scapes, after a few seasons under their belt of trial and error and support from our membership, they start to uncover certain go-to formulas and recipes for these new vegetables.
Every veggie we grow has at least 3 basic uses. Could you use it to make a salad? A skillet meal? A sauce? Grilled?
I used to seriously avoid eggplant.
But over the last 5 years, I have now discovered 2 really good options for preparing it.
Eggplant Bake
Chinese Style Beef and Eggplant
These are my “default settings” when I get this item in my box.
Researching and finding 3 good basic recipes you can use for each food variety is a way to keep the overwhelm from setting in. So I now encourage new CSA members to make it a goal to try and find 3 basic uses for each veggie.
This takes some time, but if you set a concrete goal like this, it really helps you see your progress.
Tip 5: Open the weekly email to find out what’s in your box, ideally before your pick up date, so you have time to think about ways to use the veggies.
I think people find that they waste less food if they come to the CSA box feeling prepared. That means knowing what you’re gonna get before you arrive.
We send out a really killer newsletter each week, and we let you know what you’re going to be getting in your box of veggie goodness. We also include recipe suggestions to help your brain start percolating.
We do this BEFORE you get your box, so that you have time to come up with a game plan.
Our customers tell us that if they are disciplined about taking this step — just reading the email of what to expect — that they have greater success in eating their whole box of veggies that week.
Not sure why this happens — something must be happening during your REM sleep?… LOL.
But it works.
Well, there you have it! 5 tips straight from our CSA customers.
Remember, we’ve got a whole bunch of other tips from our members that I’ve compiled into a document. Subscribe below to grab it.
It’s truly a goldmine. So get your “Gold-diggers” out and start mining.