2010 Registration Now Closed

We have filled our membership for 2010! Payments are still coming in, but we have enough commitments from old and new members to close our registration form.

If you are still interested in our CSA, you should sign up right away for our Wait List. There's always the possibility that someone who signed up decides to back out, in which case we would immediately turn to the wait list to fill in any extra shares.

Seattle's Pike Place Coming to New York's Peck Slip?

This post from The City Greens: Quinn Proposes Regional Food Market In Lower Manhattan. (New Councilwoman Margaret Chin is also on board.)

For those of us who have enjoyed the New Amsterdam Market over the past year, or who are interested in the encouragement of local and sustainable agriculture (that's you, right?) this is welcome news.

General Registration for 2010

We still have just a few shares available for 2010 and you can sign up right here.

If you need more information about us before you commit, please read our About Us page. If you still have questions, email us and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.

These shares should go quickly, and we will close the sign-up form as soon as we are filled up. In that case, you should immediately put your name on our 2011 Wait List.

Membership Update

We've just about completed our first two rounds of registration for past members and people on the wait list — and there are still about ten shares available for the 2010 season.

We'll open up general registration tomorrow, Saturday morning, right here on this site. If you know anyone who wants a chance to get organic produce from a local farm this summer, tell them to check back here this weekend.

TED Talk on the Obesity Crisis

Paula Crossfield of Civil Eats picks up on this inspiring and entertaining TED Talk by Jamie Oliver this week accepting his $100,000 TED Prize.

Jamie Oliver — yeah, the Naked Chef — is like a cross between Michael Pollen and Bono. His crusade is against the totally preventable diseases associated with obesity, and in particular what he calls the child abuse perpetrated by government via school lunch programs.

The TED Prize is designed to help someone fulfill their wish; Oliver's is:

“I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.”

All of which dovetails nicely with all the good things the Michelle Obama has been saying this week.

2010 Registration Now Open to Wait List

Everyone on our 2010 wait list has just received an email with instructions for registering for the season. Shares will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, and when we have reached our quota for the season we will close the form to any new members.

If by any chance there are still shares available in two weeks, on Feb. 25, we will open up registration to the public. Please check back here for information.

Links from Just Food

I went to a great workshop at Just Food the other night, and was reminded that they're connected to a bunch of things that might be of interest to our members. (Just Food is the organization that helps connect communities in NYC with local farms — they got us started back in 2008.)

First of all, there's the CSA in NYC Conference coming up on Feb. 28. Several of our core members are going to be attending, but the conference is open to anyone at all who's interested in the current state of CSAs in the city.

On the way out of their office, I picked up some flyers that looked interesting:

• Bee Native is a non-profit hoping to strengthen the health and increase the population of honey bees in the U.S. (And I learned that an old tradition of newlyweds drinking mead — honey wine — for the month after their wedding is where the word "honeymoon" comes from.)
• Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is promoting a 10-point Food Charter, "Principles for a sustainable food system," including environment, education, and community. You can sign on to his food pledge.
• A new cookbook called "Big Green Cookbook" gives lots of recipes and kitchen tips to help you reduce your carbon food-print.

For those of you hooked in to such things, Just Food has a useful Twitter feed and a lively Facebook page.

Fruit Share Update

Several of you have asked, so we thought we'd post an answer: we do plan on having a fruit share available again for 2010, though we haven't yet worked out the details.

There were some concerns from members about our partner last year, Breezy Hill Orchard, mostly stemming from miscommunication early in the season. We've been in touch with them about those issues, and recently received this note from Breezy Hill's Elizabeth Ryan:

Hi, I am writing to touching base about our CSA program this year. As you know, last year was our first ever experience with CSAs, and it was a quite rocky. It took us a while to get a grip on the whole thing, and as it turned out, it was also a pretty challenging year in terms of the weather, The rain was unprecedented, there were actually only 4 days in June that did not rain., and that was only the beginning of some pretty challenging weather. We wanted to reach out to you to get an understanding of whether you want to work together this year.

We learned a lot last year. We will be making some very substantial changes in our CSA's this year. There will be significantly more summer fruit, more diversity, better communication and hopefully it will be a successful year. We have spent the last several months working through the successes and challenges of last year, and have had some very helpful conversations and feedback from CSA members and lots of great advice from other CSA farmers. We also have taken on another wonderful farm with lots of cherries,peaches, plums, and apricots,

We have a full time CSA coordinator this year, Anne Matos Diaz. We will be expanding the variety of the weekly shares, we heard a lot that the early season quantities were too small, and the members wanted more diversity of fruit on a weekly basis. We think we can do that. We will also be hosting a CSA blog so that member can have a better idea of what's ripe and ready each week.

Probably our most important innovation will be a discount program so that our CSA members can get an ongoing discount in the farmers markets. I am hoping to meet personally if possible at the beginning of the season with each CSA to be sure that we are all on the same page, and to answer questions in person. We have drafted a brochure that we will be handing out at the Just Food meetings, We want to be sure that the expectations on the part of the members are line with what is realistic from a production point of view. We also hope that CSA members will take advantage of the opportunity to visit our beautiful orchards more this year.

We will also be offering the egg and pasta shares again, that was pretty straight forward.

Please let me know, of course feel free to forward this to anyone who you think should get it,

with best regards,
Elizabeth Ryan