CSA - Week One

This summer with some great encouragement and a monetary incentive from some friends we decided to join a CSA with farmer Bob. He takes money at the beginning of the growing season for a percentage of his produce. Each week until November we pick up our share of the produce. The positives are it is organic and local grown. You pay up front so it is a little pricey to join (hence why we needed some gentle prodding from friends) but the positives are:
1) We've already paid a significant portion of our summer veggie and fruit cost. Which when you are not going to be making any money and are living off your meager savings for the summer is a definite plus. Hopefully between this and our garden we can really cut our food bill.
2) We have a steady supply of organic produce.
3) We are helping to support local agriculture in our area. That is better for the environment and better for our country as a whole. There are a lot of things that I enjoy about living in a global economy but it makes me nervous that more and more of our food is coming from outside sources. What if a terrible natural disaster occurred or some horrible war or famine and we had to rely on our own stores again. Also once all the food in our country comes from other areas we are at the mercy of whatever those countries want to charge. It just makes me a little anxious. Most of my life I lived on the outskirts of towns right next to farms or orchards. The sad thing is though we wouldn't live in an area for very long before the farms were bought up, the fields leveled, and houses built. We are losing some of our best farmland and the knowledge on how to do our own produce. Bad idea if you ask me.
4) It's fun and will help supplement my own garden which truth be told is mainly a salsa and spaghetti sauce field :)

Above is our haul for the week. I'll post pictures each week so you can see what we are getting and what we are doing with it. This week we got 2 lbs of rhubarb, 1/4 pound of spinach, 1/4 pound of salad greens, and a bunch of garlic greens. Just like your own garden this one starts producing more and more as the season goes on.