If you want to know why I CSA, I could talk your ear off about the multiple benefits going the CSA route has.
In a quick few words: it's cheaper, it supports a local farm (and farm family) instead of a national chain, the money stays local, and I know exactly where my food is coming from. I go to the farm every week from spring until late fall.
I know the fields where my salad greens, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, melons, corn, spinach, kale, onions, garlic, radishes and carrots grow (and a whole bunch of other stuff I just can't remember). I know the farmer who is responsible for the fields and the produce, and I know that he farms sustainably, smartly and with deep respect for Ma Nature.
As part of my working share, I tend to the seedlings in the greenhouse, help prepare the ground for their arrival, plant them, weed them, harvest them, pack them. I spend six months getting to know these vegetables and caring for them. It's the next best thing to having my own garden - something I simply don't have time for (but wish I did).
But really, honestly and truly? It's the tomatoes.
I could try and justify my time there with the whole reduction of food miles, exercising sustainable farming, and supporting a local family, but I tell you what - I'd do it all even if all I got were boxes and boxes of tomatoes each week.
July comes and I lose my ever loving mind for tomatoes, and for eight weeks I cannot get enough of them. Even after the roof of my mouth and tip of my tongue are raw from their acid, even after consuming dozens of tomato sandwiches (an art form in itself), there simply are not enough tomatoes to satiate me. And I will never, ever, give up my quest to figure out just how many tomatoes that will take.
During our first season with the CSA, nothing - and I mean NOTHING - made me happier than being assigned to tomato duty in the barn. That meant bagging up the multiple varieties of tomatoes for the many share holders. Sometimes, those bags weighed 10 pounds. TEN pounds of tomatoes! Every bag I helped pack that summer was packed with love and adoration for those little things. It was Nirvana for me.
Even the most disgusting, gag inducing job on the Farm I did with gusto last year, because it meant protecting thousands of pounds of tomatoes: worm squishing. In the absence of pesticides (none used on our CSA Farm), that means human labor and eyes go through rows upon rows of tomatoes hunting for perfectly camouflaged tomato worms and army worms, and dispatching them. I am PhotoGrace, worm hunter extraordinaire. R'ar.
Of all the meals we share at the Farm, my favorites are, without fail, the tomato sandwich feasts. The first one happened when each of the working shares spontaneously showed up with a loaf of bread (or two!). Last year, we held a tomato sampling, trying red, green, yellow and orange varieties - and yes, each one was different... and the bigger than softballs.
But these beautiful beasts cannot be found in most grocery stores. Those red things you find in grocery stores aren't really tomatoes. Somewhere deep down in their DNA there might be some strand of old fashioned tomato. But they cannot hold a candle to a farm/garden fresh tomato. And if you're lucky enough to get one that's still warm from the sun? Oh, I swoon.
So here it is, May. My already gnawing desire for the Farm's salad mix (just weeks away) has nearly been replaced by the need for tomatoes. Two more months. Just two more months.
I have the fever... tomato fever.
