Week One of the Runamuk CSA went off–not quite without a hitch–but successfully anyway.
A lot of my spinach was still too small for picking, and the arugula never really amounted to any size. I conferred with a gardener friend of mine who suggested that arugula might perform better in the fall; so we will plant it again late in the summer. Anxious that there wasn’t enough spinach and arugula for all of my share-holders (a hoop-house would greatly enhance our early-spring productivity, but that’s still a couple years away!), I spent all day Tuesday baking bread. Which was well-received by all of my share-holders.
Still without a mode of transfer for the produce, I hurried to Skowhegan Wednesday morning where Wal-Mart carries three-pack canvas totes in the craft section. These bags seem to do the trick perfectly; I simply printed “Runamuk” onto each bag with a permanent marker. Nothing fancy. In the future I’d like to have our logo professionally applied to our CSA bags, or maybe switch to waxed vegetable boxes, but for our first year I think this is going to work just fine.
I packed hefty bundles of rhubarb into each share, along with bunches of chives, and I gave members the chance to chose weather they wanted white or oatmeal bread (if I do bread again I won’t bother with white, since everyone wanted the whole-grain bread), and a choice in sprouts too–mung bean, or alfalfa sprouts. Each share contained a newsletter as well, which is also available here.
My eleven CSA share-holders are mostly made up of family and friends, people who have known me for years. It is a good feeling that they have such faith in me and my abilities that they would pay up-front for a season of fresh vegetables. It’s not something I take lightly. All of them are really excited to be participating in a CSA program, and generally they are happy for me as I work to make Runamuk a success.
