Living in a vibrant local food producing region is a definite blessing, there is no doubt. Having a lovely small flock of chickens who produce more eggs than we can eat is also a blessing, and we are happy to be the lucky ones who tend to their randing, safety and organic feed – which it seems they need less and less of in the summer months.
This year, as we’ve just moved onto our own place over the winter, and are busy setting up gardens, hugel beds, swales and establishing our first hive of swarmed bees, we are a bit behind on getting our production up in the gardens. What with building raised beds and starting seeds and all the rest, on top of establishing all the gardens, soil tests and so forth, we just aren’t quite where we would be had we not had to ‘start over’ by moving to our own place at long last.
The benefits of a local CSA are absolutely welcome for us in this transitional moment, and particularly a local CSA which welcomes our all organic non- gmo free reange chicken eggs as a part of the ‘swap’ and agrement of our participation.
We’ve even gone so far as to request (and been happily granted!) a delivery of greens and produce for the ‘girls’ of the not fit for market produce and scraps from our CSA farmer for our chickens!
Talk about a win/win/win.
We provide all our excess eggs and we get a special delivery CSA share plus greens for the girls all at a fantastic price. Trading eggs for produce!
This week as the program kicked off and we all got in sync we got two luscious boxes of the sweetest strawberries ever, a load of collard greens, spring onions, new potatoes, radishes and luscious lettuce that filled out our week of veggies to perfection.
Yes, we are growing all kinds of lettuce, radishes and strawberries in the newly established gardens, but no, none of them are ready for harvest yet – that is the down side of a new place in the midst of winter compared to an established place in early spring. We have started all these things and they are all doing well, but in the time between we are eating like kinds and trading our excess for more of the goodness of local harvest from those who did not make a major move last winter as we did.
Life is full of bounty, and our only job is to find it where it lies in wait for us.
Happy Solstice! As the days grow longer and longer we are finding ourselves out of doors until nearly the time we would be heading to sleep. How glorious is this time of year? Quite.
