What is community supported agriculture?
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a partnership between a farm and the people it feeds. Local people sign up to become members of the farm at the beginning of the growing season and receive a share of the harvest each week — fresh from fields they know and love and grown by farmers they trust.
West County Community Farm’s summer and fall CSA program is more than abundant produce — it is a weekly experience of life on a local farm. Members enjoy an abundant strawberry u-pick patch and other u-pick crops; a buzzing cut-flower and culinary-herb garden; and an open invitation to visit the farm, the playground and picnic areas.
What does membership look like?
weekly produce
The heart of our CSA program is a 26-week harvest season of over 200 varieties of vegetables, flowers, herbs, berries, and specialty crops. From early June through Thanksgiving, members come to the farm on Saturdays from 9am-2pm or Tuesdays from 1pm to 6pm to fill a large canvas tote with whatever they choose from bins of freshly harvested produce set out in our barn. Selection changes with the seasons and free choice selection allows members to take home a larger quantity of produce catered to their tastes.
Because we don’t ship our food you get it the same day it was harvested for unparalleled freshness, flavor, and nutrition. Our model also enables us to plant smaller batches of heirloom varieties selected for taste, beauty, and novelty rather than wholesale marketability. Even seasoned foodies will discover something new.
Free choice produce is just the beginning . . .
U-PICK crops
Each week, the farm is speckled with seasonal u-pick crops which members may harvest themselves directly from the fields. The heart of our u-pick offerings is a half-acre strawberry patch that members have all to themselves. We also grow sugar snap peas, frying peppers, hot-peppers, Jack-O-Lanterns, green beans, cherry tomatoes, and more, as u-pick crops…
The farm is open for member u-picking 7 days days a week, sunrise to sunset.
CUT FLOWERS & HERBS
We maintain an extensive u-pick cut flower and culinary herb garden for members to enjoy. The garden is a place to picnic with friends, let your children run free, pick bouquets, and gather fresh herbs for the week.
We grow over 20 varieties of perennial and annual herbs — including basil, parsley, cilantro, dill, various mints, thyme, sage, sorrel, lemongrass, lemon verbena, culinary lavender, chamomile, tulsi — and over 30 varieties of cut flowers including dahlias, snapdragons, cosmos, zinnias, strawflower, amaranth, celosia, and sunflowers.
The garden is also open to members 7-days-a-week, sunrise to sunset.
Bulk crops for preserving & specialty crops
Throughout the harvest season there are ample opportunities for members to bring home bulk farm produce in addition to their weekly haul in order to make preserves like dill pickles, cabbage krauts and kimchi, basil pesto, canned tomatoes, pickled beets and green beans, and dried herbs. We also grow our own heirloom popcorn, and dent corn to mill into cornflour in the Fall.
connection
Our mission is to create a place where members can develop a relationship to the land, plants, people, and natural processes that provide for their tables. Many members say coming to the farm is the highlight of the week for their family. We cultivate this in three ways:
ACCESS
The gardens, playground, and picnic areas are open to members every day, sunrise-to-sunset, to gather u-pick crops, to enjoy the open space, to picnic with friends and family, and to watch the seasons change in the fields. Tuesday and Saturday pick-up days are particularly festive with neighbors chatting and children running through the rows.
participation
We host occasional workshops, volunteer days and work parties around major seasonal tasks like the potato harvest. Learning how to arrange flowers in the garden, or working with a group of people to bring in a big potato harvest are unforgettable experiences, forging a bond to land and neighbors and adding rich context to the food you bring home.
stories
Wendell Berry said it best, “A significant part of the pleasure of eating is one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and world from which food comes." We write a newsletter each week with recipes, news, stories and musings from the field. The newsletters are a window into what went into the food you take home and the place it came from. You can read previous newsletters here.
Value
The CSA model frees us up to do what we do best — farm — which means we can offer a huge diversity of heirloom crops and flowers to our members. Open access to the farm and gardens offer a place of respite, connection and grounding that many members and their families find essential.
Dues are calculated based on how many adults are in your household. Each adult in the household is counted regardless of their degree of participation on the farm or exact quantity of vegetable consumption. Kids ride free.
COST FOR THE 26-WEEK HARVEST SEASON, June through December:
ONE-adult HARVEST share: $1,566 ($60 per week)
two-adult HARVEST share: $2,505 ($96 per week)
three-or-MORE ADULT HARVEST share: $2,733 ($105 per week)
Prices above include 26 weeks of free-choice produce as well as all u-pick crops, cut flowers, and 7-day-a-week access to the farm, playground, and picnic areas.
share price assistance & SNAP/EBT:
We believe farm fresh food should be accessible to everyone. Every year CSA members help us make the farm more accessible by contributing to our Share Price Assistance Fund, which we use to provide reduced-cost shares to folks who request it. To request share price assistance, or to donate, check out the sign-up form below. We also accept EBT/SNAP benefits.
