I tease that Mayberry is a small town, and it is, especially if you’ve come here from New York City and you are used to being able to go to Whole Foods or a really good Indian restaurant any old time you want. But it’s still basically a suburban environment. We have sidewalks and fences and two grocery stores. We do have some neighbors who keep chickens, but after their rooster caused a flap (har har), the city passed an ordinance prohibiting roosters (although hens are still allowed).
Another neighbor has a large garden, and we’ve dabbled in pumpkins and a raspberry bush. Mostly, we buy our food at the store. But this year, we’ve tried harder to buy local. Our freezer holds 1/8 of a side of beef from a farm about 15 miles away. And we finally joined a CSA. The smart folks at what we like to call “our” farm arranged to deliver produce shares to Jeff’s workplace, and we signed up immediately.
This weekend, our farmers held an open house, so we packed up the kids and drove to the farm. Photo is filched from their website, because I was too busy enjoying the visit to take any pictures (also I might have forgotten the camera). We got to meet the friendly, welcoming couple who run the farm, their three kids, their two dogs, their cat, and a bunch of their chicks and chickens. We saw their beehives and their greenhouse and the garage converted into a packing area for their boxes, complete with long wooden slide for empty boxes traveling to the assembly line. We saw their pond and their tire swing and some of the 20 acres of fields. In these fields, they grow dozens of crops for themselves and their members, and they do everything by hand with no pesticides or synthetic fertilizer. (They have some paid and work-share staff.)
We squished in the mud (there was a lot of mud) and tasted tomatoes and green beans right off the vine. It was idyllic while at the same time an important reminder of how much work goes into an enterprise like this.
We think it made an impression on the kids. When we got home, Opie created a new Mii avatar and named it after the farmers’ son. I guess that’s what happens when you take a small-town boy out of the town and into the country.
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Sweet.
(I swear, sometimes I think the only thing my kid wants to do on the Wii is make Miis.)
This sounds lovely. We’ve avoided a CSA as I fear we’d end up composting much of the fabulous bounty, but my husband helped found a farmer’s market in our community and comes home from it each week with a load of farm fresh produce. A day in the coutnry can do a suburban kid a lot of good.
Sounds idyllic! I would join a CSA in a heartbeat if any one of us ate more than 1-2 vegetables or fruits…
Ada enjoys our farm pick up days (I think it is the raspberry bushes and the chance to jump from boulder to boulder).
Why would people want roosters? Chicks are cheap and roosters don’t make eggs.
We’re in month two of our CSA membership and we love it! Our fruit monsters demolish the box every week. We only get a shipment every other week, so we actually have to supplement from the (oh! ordinary!) grocery store.
Now there’s something you can’t get in New York City!
There’s a small town/country dichotomy just like there’s a city/suburban dichotomy. My husband grew up in a town with just 18,000 people and while he seems pretty ‘country’ to me — certainly *I* never jumped my bike into rivers on a regular basis — when I tell him that, he quickly assures me that he’s more of a city kid: he can’t ride a horse, doesn’t know how to milk a cow, and can’t tell wheat from barley…
Thanks for sharing~
What fun! We don’t have anything quite like that here, but I really enjoy taking my kids into the country.
That sounds amazing. From one Mayberry mom to another.
That sounds very cool. And I love the idea of a CSA.