9 Reasons Why You Should Sign up for a Farm Box During Quarantine

A CSA (community supported agriculture) subscription is the safest, most delicious, and inspiring way to shop (and cook) during lockdown. Here's why you should sign up for one now.

Hugh Garvey

I didn’t used to like CSA farm boxes: too many turnips, beets, and chard in heavy rotation. Not enough choice. What if I didn’t want to cook bok choy three weeks in a row? What a difference over a month in quarantine makes. The weekly box I get from County Line Harvest, which has farms in Petaluma and Thermal, California, has become my adult version of a box of Cracker Jack, a vessel of deliciousness, ripe with surprise and wonder. Kale is my caramel corn. Persian carrots my prize inside.

If you’re not familiar with CSAs, the basic model is this: You sign up for a weekly subscription, the farm or producer provides you with a regular supply of whatever they specialize in (local fish, pork and beef, chicken and eggs). But the weekly produce box is by far the most popular option out there and has kept my family well fed, happy, and healthy in recent weeks. For around about $40 we receive some 10 pounds of the freshest produce I’ve ever eaten in my life. If you have a favorite farmer’s market vendor, look them up online and see if they offer weekly boxes. Or visit localharvest.org to search for CSAs near you. For inspiration here are my 9 reasons you should sign up for one now.

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You’ll Follow the Seasons

As cool weather vegetables transition out (bye bye broccoli!), spring and early summer vegetables come in, taking over the real estate on the farms and in your box. The first of the asparagus come in slender, fattening week by week. Tender spinach and other greens replace the sturdier varieties. A bunch of coriander blossoms might be nestled in there, showing you what’s going to seed. It’s a beautiful poetry you miss when you’re shopping with your desires first and the surprise and delights of season second.

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The Relief of Less Thinking

If you’re like me, cooking three square meals a day for a family of four has given me a rotten case of decision fatigue. I find myself finishing breakfast and asking myself what’s for lunch. As I clean up my lunch dishes I’m asking what’s for dinner. You know what’s for dinner? What’s in the box!

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Surprise Micro Seasonal Vegetables!

One box contained a mystery vegetable I’d never seen before: a bushy bunch of greens with tubular leaves, like a cross between spinach and seaweed, with hints of lemon. Turns out I wasn’t far off: It was agretti, aka monk’s beard, salsola soda, barba di frate, and a host of other sing-song Italian names. It has a fleeting season in the coastal Mediterranean where it’s used in quiches, pastas, sautées, and the like. County Line Harvest has a farm in Thermal, California, just 9 miles from the Salton Sea, which makes its soil salty enough for this rare crop to thrive as it would in the Mediterranean. I sincerely believe that if restaurants were open right now, we’d be seeing agretti on all the menus. It’s that good. Without the box I wouldn’t have ever experienced this delightful vegetable I’m now experimenting with on a weekly basis.

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You’ll Finally Learn to Cook Like a Chef

You know how chefs are always saying annoyingly confident things like “I see what’s in season and let it inspire me”? Well you will too once you’ve been gifted a small bunch of thumbelina carrots: What are you going to do with them? Shave them? Slice them in coins and sautée with butter, chiles and mint? Roast with the other root vegetables you got in the box and make a mixed veg roast? Yes, yes, and yes! And soon you will gain a mastery of surfing the selection in your box.

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You’ll Be Supporting a Small, Local Business

Sure you might find cheaper vegetables at the supermarket, but it’s not going to be as fresh as what’s in a CSA box and it very likely won’t be locally produced. Small, local farms have been hit hard by restaurant closings and the social distancing in effect and have super slim margins. Even once lockdown rules are relaxed, it will take them months if not years to recover, if they even survive. Every box you order is an investment in your community.

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Two Words: Sugar Content

The fresher the vegetable the higher the sugar content. And with farm boxes you’re pretty much guaranteed to get precisely what they harvested that week. I didn’t think I liked turnips until I got CSA turnips: I’ve since discovered turnips that have just been pulled from the ground mere hours before landing in your box have more in common with a candy bar than the sad, palid, flavorless versions I’d had before. They were so sweet my entire family started competing for who got to eat them first, unadorned.

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Contactless Pick-Up

Some farms, like County Line, offer contactless pick-up: You pull up at a pre-determined pick-up location, pop your trunk, they put the box in, you close the trunk, and you’re on your way: no waiting in line outside the grocery store, no shopping cart traffic jams in the aisles. It’s blissfully socially distanced and safe.

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Look Ma, No Bags!

A recent delivery contained some 12 different kinds of vegetables and not one of them was individually bagged, thereby saving at least 11 plastic bags from landfill. (I transfer the produce to individual rewashable cloth bags before storing in the fridge).

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And You’ll Finally Eat Your Veggies

I’m a carnivore who had yet to adopt meatless Mondays until I realized that if I didn’t cook down the last of the previous week’s box I wouldn’t have room in my fridge for the new box that was going to arrive on Tuesday. Now Monday’s my “cook down the box” night. I still haven’t met a big bunch of greens that doesn’t love to be sautéed in olive oil with garlic and chile flakes, and then tossed with pasta and showered with freshly grated parmesan. (OK, bacon doesn’t hurt, either.)