September 24 was the last harvest day at Tipi Creek CSA for 2011.  We look forward to this every year.  Our Thanksgiving dinner is planned largely around what we take home that day.

Of the three years we have been members of the Tipi Creek CSA, this was the least productive.  You’ll remember that May through July was cold, wet, and dreary.  While this was mitigated to some extent by the sheer variety of vegetables grown, overall we ended up with a lot less produce than in previous years.  That being said, with August and September being hot and sunny, we still had a fantastic final harvest day.

Here’s more information on Tipi Creek:

• their website
• my run-down of the

We’ve finally crunched the numbers: we weighed every gram of food we received from our CSA share at Tipi Creek, then found prices for equivalent goods from a farmers’ market and a grocery store.

The results surprised me. I expected that the grocery store would be by far the cheapest, and that the CSA would be only slightly cheaper than the farmers’ market. In reality, the grocery store was marginally cheaper than the CSA, while the farmers’ market was much, much more expensive. The final costs were:

• CSA Cost: $600
• Farmers’ Market Cost: $1044.73
• Grocery Store Cost: $510.76

I was shocked to see how close the CSA and grocery store prices ended up. Obviously I always knew the farmers’ … Continue reading.

This past Saturday was the last harvest day at Tipi Creek CSA. All the remaining vegetables were picked and divided amongst the shareholders.

As one of our farmers put it, this was a mushroom year, and a cold crop year: we got lots of moisture, but very little heat. Hence the plentiful, but mostly green, squash. The last few weeks of overcast drizzle stalled two of the corn varieties, and the fall spinach. Other crops, notably cabbage and broccoli, flourished in the cold. Risk is mitigated by crop diversity.

Here are some photos and notes from the harvest day.
Potatoes

With the potato foliage long killed off, a potato digger is dragged over the rows. The digger lifts masses of … Continue reading.

Since 2009, Lisa and I have been members of the Tipi Creek CSA.  CSA usually stands for community supported agriculture, but at Tipi Creek Farm stands for community shared agriculture.

Here’s the skinny.  In March we pay a flat fee. Three times between planting in May and the last harvest in September, we go to Tipi Creek and spend a few hours helping out. This may involve planting, weeding, or harvesting. In return for our money and labour, every week from roughly July to the end of September we get a shipment of vegetables.

Last year we received salad greens, spinach, Swiss chard, onions, leeks, kale, radishes, peas, beets, cucumbers, zucchini, broccoli, rhubarb, corn, pumpkins, squash, watermelon, potatoes, kohlrabi, beans, … Continue reading.