If you’ve found your way to reading this, there’s a pretty good chance that you are interested in eating locally sourced food. Making the commitment to this usually means that you care about what you eat, where it comes from and how it was raised.

 Joining our CSA is just one of many options you have, but we’d like to think it is one of the most interesting enjoyable and authentic ways of doing so. Purchasing a CSA share almost always means that more of your diet will be fresh nutrient dense vegetables. The delivery arrives, usually picked and washed the day before, and you have 8-12 items to cook with that week. The varieties we grow are chosen for flavor and nutrition, not how well they ship across the country or keep on the supermarket shelf. This applies to carrots, tomatoes, melons and many others.

To consider where your food comes from can mean the environmental costs of growing in California desert climates and 3000 miles of trucking. But the flip side of that is buying local boosts the local economy. We learned at a recent local food summit that only 1% of money spent on food in Centre County, PA goes to local producers.

To care how one’s food is raised may be the most important consideration in choosing your local farmers. We welcome all customers to visit us to see and discuss our practices the first Saturday of every month. You be the certifier. The term sustainable agriculture is often used to describe our approach to growing. Author and poet Wendell Berry explains what that practice means much better than I could:

“It must preserve the land, and the fertility and ecological health of the land; the land, that is, must be used well. A further requirement, therefore, is that if the land is to be used well, the people who use it must know it well, must be highly motivated to use it well, must know how to use it well, must have time to use it well, and must be able to afford to use it well. (“Nature as Measure” in What Are People For? 1990, 206-7)

We would sure like you to consider joining our CSA this season. It is great fun to share the garden’s bounty with family or friends from the first spring shoots of asparagus through the tomatoes of summer to the last frost sweetened crops of the fall. We’ll see to it that you know what fresh tastes like. The details of our program are listed under the CSA menu of the website. If you have any questions at all please don’t hesitate to email or call.

Diane, Lucy and Bruce Cramer