It’s time to start thinking about those CSAs

It’s finally spring here in the Pacific Northwest. Days of 70+ temperatures, sunlight, and Mt. Rainier have come again. Days like the past few make the long winter oh so worth it. Now that (hopefully) we’ll

A typical CSA box

have more sunny days than cloudy for a while, it’s time to start thinking about whether or not you’re interested in joining a CSA.

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. When you join a CSA, you commit to buying a certain amount of produce, commonly known as a share. This share helps the farm meet their operating costs for the year. Some CSAs requires you to prepay for the entire season, others for a month at a time, and still others are week to week or month to month.

There are several questions you need to ask yourself when choosing a CSA.

1. Does the CSA offer online ordering? You may or may not care much about online ordering, but it certainly made things easy for us last year. Of course, online ordering is only important if you can customize what is in your box. Which leads us to the next question…
2. Does the CSA allow you to preview the contents of your box and pick and choose items? If you are allergic to zucchini and peppers, you need to be able to specify no zucchini and peppers. If your garden has just spit out a bumper crop of carrots, you probably don’t want carrots this particular week. On the other hand, if you’re planning a big party and need three times the average number of tomatoes for pasta sauce, will they let you do that?
3. Does the CSA offer multiple sizes of boxes? If you’re a family of four or more, chances are you can use any size CSA box. But if it’s just one or two of you at home, a full sized box is going to be way too much produce (unless you’re into canning and preserving). You’ll want to look into a small box or a half share.
4. Does the CSA offer multiple pickup/drop off locations? If you get a CSA from a stand at the farmers markets, chances are they will bring your box to the market each week. But that still means a trip to the market. Hopefully you’re going anyway to pick up meat, eggs, cheese, and bread, but if you’re not, look for a CSA that has convenient pickup and drop off locations for you.
5. Will the CSA let you skip a week? Summer is prime time for vacations. If you’re going to miss a week, will the CSA stop your box for that week? Will they donate it to a local food bank for you? Will they deliver it somewhere else so you can gift it to a friend or neighbor?
6. How easy is it to get replacement items? Especially during hot summer weeks, certain items like lettuce and berries can go bad quickly in a box. If you get mushy berries or horribly wilted lettuce, will the CSA replace those items for you?
7. Where does your CSA produce come from? There are two very popular services in Seattle: Full Circle Farms and New Roots Organics. (New Roots is a home delivery service and Full Circle has a variety of pickup locations in and around Puget Sound.) However, the most important thing to note about both of these two services is that they are not 100% Washington sourced, particularly during the winter months. Full Circle Farms sources many items from California, Oregon, and Idaho and New Roots often has citrus in their boxes at all times of year, which is definitely not local.  The items are organic, and they are from farms that are vetted by New Roots and Full Circle, so it is certainly better than buying produce from Mexico or Peru all winter long, but it isn’t strictly local. This shouldn’t be an immediate deal breaker, unless you have committed to being a strict locavore, but it is something to go into with your eyes open.
8. How long does the CSA run? If you’re new to the CSA world, you might want to start with a CSA that only runs a few months. Some CSAs run from June to October, others from May to November, and still others run year-round. What is the shortest amount of time you can sign up for? If you decide after 2 months that it just isn’t working out, do you have any recourse? Can you donate the rest of your subscription? Transfer it to a friend?
9. How much packaging is used? Thanks to reader GreenGo Foods for pointing out this often overlooked question. Does the CSA use lots of bags and plastic wrap to secure their items? Some don’t use any, some use a lot. In my case, for my CSA last year (Growing Washington), the only packaged items were: green beans, peas, the occasional squash (when it was smaller squash) and loose leaf lettuce. Even this was a little more than necessary, as honestly, the squash didn’t need to be put in a bag. Berries were put in paper bags to prevent moisture accumulation. The boxes that were used for delivering the produce were reused.
10. What does it cost? This is a tricky question as just about every CSA will have a different price and will contain a differing amount of produce. We’ll try to break down the various CSAs available around Puget Sound and let you know how good of a value we think they are.

Starting next week, we’ll cover one or two CSAs a week until we’ve hit all of the major CSAs that are available in Puget Sound. If you’ve got a question about CSAs that you’d like us to include in our list of questions we pose to each and every CSA provider we can get in touch with, leave it in the comments and we’ll try to get your questions answered.