Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

This is Terra Fry and each week she delivers a box of fresh produce to our front porch along with a bouquet of flowers. Terra is one of a passel of lovely daughters raised organically at Fry Family Farms near Ashland. We’ve been watching Terra and her sisters for some years, watching their progress from weekly seasonal visits to the local Farmer’s Market. The Fry Family Farms booth has always been our main stop. Suzi Fry, normally presides, with a friendly greeting and a big smile surrounded in the early years by a covey of little girls and now by a crew of attractive young women who radiate health and the benefits of hard work. When we can’t get to the Tuesday market, Fry Family Farms produce is available at the Ashland Community Food store. We’ve been Fry fans for many years. Suzi even provided flowers for one of our kids’ weddings. My dad, who was in his late seventies at the time, was delegated to assist me in the gathering of the flowers and we traipsed out to Wagner Creek to pick them up. He got a greeting I’m certain he never forgot for when Suzi came out to welcome  us she gave him a hug, a genuine hippie-style hug; so long and sincere that he talked about it all the way home while the perfume of flowers infused the happy atmosphere of my truck.
So this year when we learned that the Frys were going to offer a CSA, we signed up early even knowing that we’d be gone half the summer. Community Supported Agriculture is a growing development in the organic food movement. Community members buy a share of the harvest in advance. This evens out the growers cash flow which certainly must allow for better planning and staffing of the farm. We participated in another CSA some years ago and found it lacking. Not so with the Frys. They fertilize the whole enterprise with a sense of fun and purpose and include a newsletter each week with reports on the crop, recipes and an “Employee of the Week.” This week it was Terra who, if you can believe it is only 15 years old. (She’s a Michelle Wie kind of 15 year old. Precociously mature and competent). The write up in the newsletter reports that she’s wise beyond her years and runs several miles to get in shape for soccer before reporting for her many hours at the farm.
Each Thursday we look forward to the delivery. First of all, there’s the bouquet, a really nice touch. This week we got: salad mix, lettuce, radishes, artichokes, potatoes (the absolute best I’ve ever eaten), summer squash, cucumber, apricots and red and green cabbage. The flowers were sun flowers. The service is so good that if you aren’t going to be home you can leave a cooler on the porch along with a jar of water and Terra will transfer your produce to the cooler and put the flowers in the jar. The whole experience is a treat and feels like a luxury. We spin our weekly food menu off the delivery. We’re going to miss our Fry Family Farm CSA when we leave to go to Lummi Island. But, there’s good news in the form of Three Pheasants Farm on Lummi which I’m sure I’ll feel compelled to write about later. But the short version is that on the island we ride to Three Pheasants each day on a tandem bike with basket panniers and fill them up with more organic goodies. The Three Pheasants and Fry folk—same kind of great people growing healthy food.