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We got this nice letter from our fruit & egg (& pasta) farmer and wanted to share it with you:

Dear CSA Members,

We at Breezy Hill Orchard, Stone Ridge Orchard and Knoll Krest Farm would like to thank you for an incredible 2010 season. For five and a half months we brought you a selection of the best fruit, eggs, and pasta we had to offer. Your early support enabled us to invest in the vital staffing and equipment that kept us going strong at the beginning of the year. Without your support, the seeds could not be planted and the trees could not be pruned. In exchange we worked week after week to provide a variety of top quality fruit, eggs and pasta and to ensure a smooth delivery. We hope you could taste the result of our great effort in the shares you received every week. Like most years, we faced a few challenges in 2010 including an early frost and a summer drought. With trickle irrigation we persevered. Your continued membership can help us with the challenges we will surely face in 2011.

For the 2011 season, our determination to provide the highest quality product and customer service is even greater. Now that we have completed our sophomore year serving CSAs, our operation will only become more efficient. We’d like for you to join us in our third year of providing fruit, eggs, and pasta to CSA members. Seasonal, local fruit is a healthy part of any diet, and it’s our honor to share it with you. CSAs are a great way to ensure that local farms have a future in New York State, and the most important part of the CSA is your individual memberships.

Along with two years serving CSAs, Breezy Hill Orchard and Stone Ridge Orchard are Eco Apple certified for two years running. The health of our customers, the health of our land, and our own health are the top priorities in our decision making process. Through the Eco Apple program, our environment can continue to be healthy and strong for years to come.

In addition to our many farmers’ market locations, we are excited to announce a new store front location at La Marqueta in East Harlem. With the office space that this store front provides, our NYC based coordinator will improve communication and coordination with CSAs. In addition, this space provides a potential site for a CSA distribution. We have also opened a new store front in our own backyard in the village of Rhinebeck, NY. So if you find yourself in East Harlem or Rhinebeck, please stop by and visit us.

CSAs have become one of the cornerstones of Breezy Hill Orchard’s success, and we owe it all to you. This year many CSA members made it up to the farm, and next year we hope to see each and every member come to see where their fruit grows. So as we celebrate the New Year, please renew your CSA membership. Say yes to local business, say yes to healthy eating, and say yes to sustainable farming practices. With that yes comes months of high quality food delivered directly to your neighborhood. We’d love to work with you again.

Best wishes during the holiday season, and Happy New Year!

Elizabeth Ryan, Anne Diaz-Matos, Stephen Burgess, and Everyone at Breezy Hill

During the season, core members on duty at distribution get lots of feedback from members about which vegetables they’re glad to get and which ones they’d be happy to never see again.

It’s hard to take all that in anecdotally and give back to our farmers in some meaningful way. So the end of season survey offers us a chance to see much more broadly how members felt about the vegetable selection over the course of the season. We’re sharing this data with Julia and David, and thought you might be interested to see the results as well:

Thank you to everyone who took the time to complete our 2010 survey. What follows is a snapshot of results. We’ll also be posting some specific comments (without attribution) over the next few days, and then following up with responses from Julia and David at Woodbridge Farm.

I guess we already knew that these were all reasons why people join a CSA, but it’s interesting to see their relative importance. “High Quality Produce” was listed as Very Important by the largest number of respondents; “Economic Value” was marked Not Important most often.

“Income Accessibility” was a slightly different kind of question, which is why I’m showing it at the bottom, but is still considered an important aspect of the CSA by a large majority of members.

These are all values the CSA should aspire to improve.

While the quality of our vegetables was generally appreciated by most members, a sizable number were disappointed in the variety and value of our produce. And all of these marks were significantly worse than last year’s, when disappointment was marginal.

Our fruit share received high marks for quality and value, though variety comes across as a source of some disappointment. I take this, though, not to be the fault of Breezy Hill Orchards, which actually managed to have a much better harvest of berries and stone fruits than last year. Instead, it’s probably a matter of communication from the core group. Local fruit in the northeast primarily means one thing: apples. The season for berries is extremely short. We need to make sure members know they are basically buying an apple share, with a few other treats tossed in.

Eggs, pasta, and cheese received generally high marks, with one exception: cheese variety.

Not bad marks for the CSA organization, though, since this is the one area over which the core group has total control, we’ll keep trying to get those blue parts of the bar down to zero.

Finally, we asked members, if they had to decide right now, would they sign up again for the CSA in 2011.

For those of us who have worked hard to put the CSA together, that’s a disappointing final judgement. We’ll be meeting next week to start making plans for 2011, and we hope to be able to give more of you reasons to come back next year.

With only two more distributions left in 2010, it’s time to start assessing our season. Core members have had a host of conversations recently about our relationship with Woodbridge Farm and how we’ve organized the CSA, but what we really need now is concrete feedback from CSA members. We’ve decided to post our end of season survey before the year is up so that your experience is still fresh in your mind (and so that we can nudge you for two weeks in person to go online and fill in your answers).

Please take 5 minutes to fill out the survey.

We’re asking for your feelings about specific vegetables, your general satisfaction with the CSA, and your intention for 2011. We’ll be sharing these survey results with our partners at Woodbridge Farm, Breezy Hill Orchards, and with Just Food (the group that helps organize CSAs in NYC) to make plans for 2011.

This survey is a critical part of getting feedback to our farmers. Please fill it out.

We’re also in the process of scheduling a date in early December to meet again with David and Julia of Woodbridge Farm. The plan is to address in person any concerns raised by our members. We’ll let you know when we pick a date.

Thank you for your help improving the Grand Street CSA.

Distribution will stay open until 9PM.

We're expecting veggies around 6:30. We will email and post to the blog again when he arrives. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Hi Jeremy,

At first I felt proud to hear your members feel our CSA is more bountiful than theirs this year, but then I started feeling sorry for your farmers. I just feel the need to “defend” your farmers, because I know some day we will have an “off” year. Each farm is so individual, there is no way to truly compare and say “All these other farms have plenty of produce and they didn’t get any rain either, so what’s wrong with our farm?” For instance one farm may have a 5 acre pond to pump water out of, another has a deep well that only gets 4 gallons per minute. Plus microclimates are all over, another example, our farm is next to the Hudson River and therefore our temperatures run warmer about 2 weeks earlier and later than other farms 10 minutes down the road. As small farmers we are all individuals also, maybe there was illness to deal with, equipment breakdowns happen all the time, etc. My husband David works 16 hour days M-S and on Sundays drives to NYC for farmers market making it a 19-20 hour day. He never complains, he loves his job, you have to or no one would work that hard. So instead of trying to find fault with your farmers, give them some thanks for all their hard work and appreciate what they HAVE been able to produce this year. Next year will be completely different!

Melinda

Our hosts at Abrons Arts Center have invited us to tonight’s opening reception for their Amplify Exhibition. From the postcard:

How to live a creative and sustainable life?

Designers, academics, organizations, and urban activists joined forces to identify individuals and communities that are creating more sustainable ways of living and working.

The exhibition will ask questions and demonstrate new ideas for solving old problems by showcasing installations about creative communities on the Lower East Side and around the world.

Opening reception is tonight, 6-8pm. The exhibition remains open through September 15.

Our neighbors at Educational Alliance have been running some food programs in conjunction with Just Food. The next one is this coming Wednesday:

Wednesday, July 21st, 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm
BASICS OF SEASONAL COOKING

Cooking with local and seasonal food is the best way to eat the freshest and most nutritious food. Local food at its peak is full of vitality, energy and nutrients. In this class, you’ll learn how to create meals centered on the bounty of locally-grown produce. Cost is $18, pre-registration is required by Monday July 19th.

For registration details, go to the Educational Alliance page for this event.

Hello members.

Thank you for your patience and perseverance tonight. Our farmer hit a 7-hour traffic jam on the way to deliver our produce, arriving at Abrons after 8pm. For those of you who made it back to distribution, hopefully you’ll agree it was worth the trek.

For those of you that couldn’t come back, you still have a chance to grab your veggies on Wednesday. One of our core members has agreed to store about 14 half shares overnight in a cool (but not refrigerated) space. At about 8 am, she will leave individual half share bags in the hallway outside her apartment for pickup on a first come, first served, honor system basis.

    Seward Park Coops
    415 Grand Street (corner of Clinton)
    Apt. E1404

This is the center bank of elevators, go to the 14th floor, and turn left off the elevators and go to the end of the hall. Your grocery bag of produce will be waiting. The doormen are pretty cool if you just look like you belong. No need to ring the bell, just grab your share. If the lettuce looks wilted, there’s a good chance some cold water will perk it right back up again.

This was an extraordinary experience for all of us, so we really appreciate everyone’s patience, understanding, and good humor. Though this hasn’t happened before, and we hope will not happen again, we’ll be working on some clearer contingency plans to make any future delays run more smoothly. If you have any suggestions, feel free to email us.

Thank you.