Prelude to Posh Gardens CSA

Harvest Day at Posh Market Garden

In addition to providing a Farm to Table experience for our Posh Cottage guests, I want to start a small CSA for Posh Market Garden. CSA stands for community supported agriculture. It is what many Market Gardens use to generate produce sales. How it works is community members basically buy a membership, for lack of a better word. They pay X amount of dollars up front to the Market Garden and that allows them to have access to X amount of produce that comes from the garden.

A CSA is something I’m considering for Posh Market Garden, but we aren’t quite there yet. That said, to Andy and I’s great surprise the vegetable section of our garden is generating produce! Thus far, I’ve harvested, Swiss Chards, lettuce, Lemon cucumbers and Pickling cucumbers, snap peas, and jalapeno peppers! Combined it is more than Andy and I can eat so I’ve reached out to Blaine’s farm store and Anita’s Produce and Pantry, and both accepted our goods.

I’ve also reached out to a few of my friends to see if they’d be interested in fresh vegetables, and low and behold they are! I’m calling it “A Prelude to Posh Gardens CSA”. I’m testing the waters as well as starting to build up a list of potential members. The first week three friends bought my vegetables, the second week I had two returning ‘customers’ and one new one. My thought is, if I can build up a client list with contact information, then when we do official start the CSA we have a target audience already established. My thought is if I can establish ten CSA members then I’d be happy. I’m not looking to make a killing but rather to not have to throw away food.

I also reached out to a local restaurant to see if perhaps they’d be up for purchasing our veggies! I’m also reaching out to our local food bank to see if they will accept donations and how that works. Ideally, I’d love to establish the CSA, be a local food supplier to one of our Palisade restaurants and donate produce to the food bank. It is ambitious I know but as we build out the Market Garden the number of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and herbs we produce will continue to grow in quantity.  Starting the CSA and working with our local restaurants will help us generate revenue for the farm and donating to the food bank allows us to give back to the community!