Thank You! from Jeanne and Steve

This is the final week of the regular season CSA deliveries for 2011. But don’t let that stop you from getting your veggies! The Winter CSA starts in two weeks–if you are planning to sign up and haven’t yet, check the info below and sign up now.

Thanksgiving is next week and we feel thankful for so many things this year. Here are some thanks we wish to convey:

Thanks to our excellent farm crew, who work hard all year, seeding, weeding, planting, harvesting, washing, and packing vegetables and fruit for your boxes. Antonio, Erasmo, Esperanza, Faustino, Felix, Fermina, Jaime, Gabriel, Hector, Levi, Maria, Misael, Noe, Oscar, and Rodrigo — we couldn’t do it without all your hard work. And thanks to Aaron for tending the orchards and attending to the gophers.

Thanks to our drivers, Liam and Rex, for your dedication, reliability, and cheerful willingness to handle anything that comes up on the delivery routes. And thanks also to Liam for your general handiness and work on maintenance and special projects around the farm on non-driving days.

Thanks to Chrissi, for brightening our lives with your centered cheerfulness while wrestling with our quirky customer database and handling all the little bits and pieces that need to be sewn together for our CSA to work.

Thanks to Andrew for all the hard work and original recipes that you have provided for our CSA newsletter and website. We are very grateful to have a chef on hand who specializes in cooking foods fresh from the farm. And thanks to Joni for sharing your cooking expertise with us in cooking demonstrations that helped CSA subscribers learn to use what’s in the box with easy and tasty cooking techniques.

Thanks to Laura for your many years spent caring for our native habitat restoration area, as you set about caring for a new project — your sweet little baby boy.

Thanks to the site hosts for allowing us to use your homes, churches, businesses, and schools to drop off our CSA boxes. You are the central focus points of our CSA program, where neighbors come together to pick up their farm shares. We truly appreciate your opening your spaces to the community and all that you do to help the CSA program run smoothly week after week.

Thanks to all of you who subscribe to our CSA. You help us survive as a small farm, and enable us to grow food in a way that respects the land we farm, preserves the environment around us, and lets us produce varieties of fruit and vegetables that would not be commercially viable on a larger scale. You are also part of a bigger movement supporting local food production, a sustainable system of organic agriculture, and “real” food, to counter the nation’s trend towards consumption of more and more processed foods. We are so glad that you all are out there looking for the sorts of vegetables and fruits that we want to grow!

And a special thanks to all of you who filled out our survey. We’ve received over 350 responses and you gave us great feedback that we can use as we go into the next season’s planting and planning. While we know we can’t please everybody all the time (there are inevitably people who have opposite requests–e.g. those who want more broccoli vs those who never want to see broccoli again!), we can get a good overall sense of those items that many people felt were over or under represented in your boxes. People were generally positive about on-line payment, and a majority of folks said they like getting the paper version of the newsletter. In addition, we received many useful comments and specific suggestions that we will act on to the best of our ability.

In our less busy winter season, we’ll be planning our crops for next year, setting up an on-line sign-up system, improving the way recipes are listed in the website, and in general working to make the CSA everything we want it to be. Oh, and we’ll be picking, packing, and delivering winter CSA boxes every other week! (Well, it sounds like a pretty busy season, after all.) We’ll send out newsletters on the weeks of the winter deliveries through the winter. Thanks for a wonderful year!