Theme: CSA

News From the Farm | April 1, 2019

Prom Corsage? (Thank you Margaret Dollbaum, for this photo!) 

The weather prediction is that early April will bring more late rain and coolish weather to our already soaked and saturated soils.  These late spring rains have made it impossible to prepare our fields for planting, let alone get crops started for spring. In some years, our Mediterranean climate provides windows during the winter and early spring that allow us to prepare ground, plant seeds and keep a lineup of a few crops coming, but in other years, like this one, there are no openings, and we can’t work our fields because they are wet.  So we are slowly harvesting our way through each and every field of crops planted before the rain started, with one eye on the weather reports and the other on the calendar. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 11, 2019

Shhhh… don’t let anyone know but I love my job. I love our farm, I love all the people I work with, I love going to the farmers markets, I feel blessed to be able to help each day to make this farm productive and beautiful. I feel good about what I do everyday. I believe in my life and work each morning when I awake and even more so when I fall asleep. Strange, I know, but true. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | February 11, 2019

Stop Plastic Bags!

One advantage of being a CSA member that you may not have thought about is the very significant amount of waste that is removed from the landfill by a CSA program compared to the grocery store alternative.  We have done a little bit of analysis, comparing the packaging for the first 4 CSA boxes of the year to the packaging that we would have used if we had sold the same produce to stores, restaurants and wholesalers instead. If we had sold to stores, we would have packed the produce into 1,095 waxed cardboard boxes, 319 non-waxed cardboard boxes and 61 plastic 25-lb bags! The plastic bags and waxed cardboard boxes generally end up in the landfill so the CSA results in a pretty significant reduction in the waste stream.   [Read more…]

News From the Farm | February 4, 2019

Three  beds of tulips have all started to bloom at once, the first flowers available for 2019. They will be available at our farmers markets: Berkeley on Tuesday afternoon; San Rafael on Thursday morning and Palo Alto on Saturday morning. 

What You Ate Last Year  – On our Full Belly web site in our description of our Community Supported Agriculture program, we promise that if you join, you will “eat the freshest, most nutritious fruits and vegetables available.”  There are lots of ways to parse that promise, but this week we’re going to take a look at our program using a pretty straightforward metric:  What did we deliver to you in your boxes last year? [Read more…]

News From the Farm | December 3, 2018

This is your last box of 2018!

Full Belly’s CSA project was started in 1992 and since then has been one of the mechanisms for connecting us with a community beyond the farm.  The fruits, flowers and vegetables in the CSA boxes deliver healthy and fresh nutrition to families within a hundred mile radius.  But sometimes I think of the boxes as something much more than that  — a subtle kind of inoculation perhaps…  At first, a member may think that it is just some healthy organic food that they signed up for.  Before long, if they stick with the relationship, they may find that there is a whole lot more to unpack from the green plastic boxes. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | October 8, 2018

Getting your produce directly from a local farmer is a radically different way to shop than going to a grocery store.  You are trusting the farmer to choose your produce for you, you are investing in the farm in advance (thus venturing into a long-term relationship… gulp), you are cooking much more fresh and unprocessed food, and you are eating seasonally.  That seasonal element may mean that even though in the course of a year you will taste a very high diversity of fruits and vegetables, the experience from week-to-week can bring some repetition.  [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 26, 2018

Open Farm Day

Saturday 3/24 was Open Farm Day at Full Belly Farm.  We all had a lot of fun.  Delicious pizza, fresh orange juice made on the spot, kite-flying, playing in the brook and listening to the frogs, tours of the fields, lamb petting, and playing and picnicking on the grass.  It was a warm, beautiful spring day.  CSA members received a jar of marmalade made from our Full Belly oranges. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | March 5, 2018

Open Farm Day Saturday March 24

Full Belly Farm Open Farm Day is coming up soon on Saturday March 24th.  It is likely to be a beautiful Spring day, perfect for an outing to the country.  It is your opportunity to enjoy the lovely flowers growing in our farm fields, visit our lambs, take a tour of the farm, and picnic on pizza from our wood-fired oven.

A visit to your local family farm is a way to get back in touch with where your food is coming from. Maybe you will figure out something more about the people who are growing the cabbage, potatoes and collards that you get every week in your CSA box. Or maybe you will enjoy the opportunity to smell a handful of the soil at Full Belly — soil that has been managed organically since 1985. Maybe you will just want to bring a friend and picnic on the green lawn in the Spring sun, a time to get away from city sounds. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | February 5, 2018

What did the CSA member have to eat for dinner?

No, this is not the first line of a joke — “What did the CSA member have to eat for dinner… I don’t know, what? Cabbage, Squash and Arugula of course…”  No, this is our annual report on how we fed our members last year, and it shows that members had a healthy dose of variety and nutrition!

Here are the top ten items that were in the 2017 Full Belly CSA Box:

Greens (Chard, Kale, Asian Greens, Collards, Arugula)

Fruit (Oranges, Grapes, Pomegranates, Peaches, Pears, Plums, Apricots, Figs and Strawberries)

Carrots

Potatoes

Winter Squash (Butternut, Delicata, Kabocha, Red Kuri, Acorn, Honeynut, Spahghetti, Sweet Dumpling)

Salad Mix and Lettuce

Melons

Beets

Tomatoes and Cherry Tomatoes

Cabbage (green, Napa, red and Savoy) [Read more…]

News From the Farm | January 15, 2018

The first week back from the Full Belly break brought more than it’s share of CSA mix-ups, culminating when one of our drivers delivered CSA boxes to the wrong site!  By the time our office staff found out, the driver (who was filling in for the regular staff) was long gone and members were wondering where their veggies were.  Luckily, one of our kind and generous members volunteered to ferry the boxes back to their correct location, while in the background the host (who was out of town) offered support and encouragement. So we got it all straightened out, but the adventure really brought home to us the way that this CSA program relies on the contributions of so many people — the wonderful hosts who allow our members to pick up veggies at their homes or businesses, and our members who have patience learning how it works and who cooperate and collaborate to make it a success.

Thank you to all of you, and a special thank you to the heroes of our first week in 2018, member Jenny Postich who drove our CSA boxes to their correct location, and Danville Host Kerri Heusler who was able to provide up-to-date intelligence using her porch camera, from her remote site out of town. [Read more…]

News From the Farm | November 13, 2017

Getting Dinner on the Table

Years ago at a Farmers Market, one of our CSA members opened his CSA box and said to me, sounding a bit exasperated, “I just need to get dinner on the table after work so the kids can go to bed on time.”   I don’t remember what it was about the box that he was responding to, but his comment worried me.  We hear similar expressions of frustration whenever we put too many pomegranates in the box — “So much time, so little return” –– or when there is 1/2 pound of spinach and the cook needs a whole pound to complete a chosen recipe.  

I have come to realize that we are in our own private produce reality at Full Belly, cracking open watermelons in the heat of the summer and devouring them whole, or crunching our way through an entire bunch of carrots from our ‘quality control’ CSA box before the rest of the vegetables have even been noticed.  You can find snacking-bowls full of pomegranate seeds in most of the kitchens around the farm these days, and huge oversized cabbages greeted with comments like, “I LOVE cabbage!” Full Belly interns often arrive at the farm with very little experience of beets, chard, rutabaga or daikon — but each of them is assigned to cook lunch for several dozen farm hands once a week.  Of course the results are varied, but I do think that those that arrive saying they can’t cook and don’t want to, leave the farm with more kitchen-confidence. [Read more…]

Looks Delicious!

July 31, 2017

Sarah from one of our Sacramento CSA sites shared this photo with us. She said it’s Full belly pie crust, eggplant and basil!!

Letters

I have been a contented Fully Belly Farm CSA subscriber for many years.  I also have a blog which often features produce from the Full Belly CSA veggie box, and I like to link to Full Belly through my recipes.  My blog is called recipemuse.wordpress.com, and I’ll include a link to my latest entry, “Carrot Salad with Lavender and Thyme.”  It uses the fabulously beautiful carrots from my box last week.    

Just wanted to let you see how I’m using the bounty of my veggie boxes.  Thank you!

Yours, Penny  –  Cornell Ave, Albany site

News From the Farm | July 17, 2017

This past spring I had the honor of taking a UC Berkeley design thinking class called Eat.Think.Design! To a degree I’d never imagined, it was intimate, hands-on, edgily interdisciplinary, upended established ways of thinking, an intentional community, out to better the world through food.  I got my first choice project team – Fair Labor Produce: working through empathy, interviews, research, prototyping, and play to increase transparency around labor conditions for farm workers in the Salinas region.  Judith was a great resource.

A few weeks before the big Innovation Feast, where we presented our projects to a diverse audience, came the best class of all. Homework: Bring a food to share with the class that is meaningful to you, and come tell what it means.  This most basic of human experience – sharing who we are, through food.  A crockpot, a toaster oven, chaat made of fish parts, mangos five ways, stories about falling in love, stories about finding out who we are, stories about food aboard a submarine, stories about a home far away.  The community that we had become grew twice as deep that night. [Read more…]

Letters

This morning’s melon was absolutely the best. I just finished up with a little cottage cheese and toast, and I am writing to you to keep myself from eating the other half of the melon. It is flavors and quality like this that keep me coming back to Full Belly — both my CSA subscription and your farmers market booth on Tuesdays. Can’t wait for my tomatoes for lunch.

Thank you again for all the wonderful veggie boxes for the rabbits over the cooler months. We are fortunate right now in that we have very few rabbits in our care, either eight or nine rather than the 30+ we had over the winter. So this is the best time for us not to be getting a box. We have a little garden in one of our yards at the shelter, and we are growing enough chard, kale and herbs to supplement what the city provides. Plus, there is a lot of wild fennel growing near the shelter now, so we can harvest that. But we would be delighted to get boxes when the weather gets cool again, if you can provide us that. 

Enjoy your summer and thank you so much for being out there!

Wags,

Pat Luchak

P.S. The “box” that Pat is talking about is a box of greens that Full Belly provides for the rabbits during the cooler weather.  The rabbits are under the care of Oakland Animal Services, which invites people to become involved in their program — adopting, volunteering or donating.

Letters from Members

Thank you so much for your continued support to Charlotte Maxwell.  I was the one who asked this of Full Belly – many moons ago when I was one of the founding staff members. So appreciate you guys!!!

Judy  –  62nd St, Oakland site

Letters to the Editor

I just wanted to drop a line and say that we love the produce you send us–all of it.  I feel bad when I read that you have people frustrated and wanting substitutions. Last year, my favorite part of the CSA was getting all the new stuff I’d never seen before (red kuri squash? I’d never heard of it before, but it was so delicious that now I look for it everywhere I go). My second favorite part was getting a lot of some things–I’ll never get tired of getting loads of tomatoes, greens, potatoes… you name it! Keep it coming!

—————

Please stop the cabbage! It has been relentless, and I am winding up giving it away because I can’t keep up with it. Apparently the same is true for other members, because every week there are several heads in the share boxes at the end of the day. I love cabbage and make some very good soup with it, but the amount we’ve been getting is just too much.

——————

I just wanted to respond to say that I love the “lack of choice” because it forces me to discover new ways of cooking vegetables (especially cabbage! which I now love) and is a true representation of seasonal offerings. Talking to others at my pick-up location, I know this sentiment is shared by many. Thanks for doing what you do, and for the always thoughtful newsletter.

Thoughts From One of Our Members About the CSA – March 6, 2017

I’m sorry that people stop getting the box because they have to get stuff they don’t like, or know how to use, or they wish they could substitute other things.  Those are among the reasons I like getting the box.  Life is actually just like that.  If we play our cards right, we can get a lot of good stuff, some stuff we do not like, or don’t need and it’s kind of random in that way. We do not get to pick and choose everything in life.  That is, in fact, what makes life interesting, and what makes it life.  I don’t want my organic box to be an exercise in customization.  The farm is a farm, not a computer program, and I like it that way.  Also, I feel burdened sometimes by so many choices.  I appreciate that all I have to do with the box is go pick it up at the same time every week, and my mind can take a vacation from choosing.

News From the Farm | February 27, 2017

We recently surveyed members who had had stopped getting their CSA box, asking them why they didn’t renew.  We were glad to find out that 87% of the 260 people who responded were happy with the box, and 76% said that they would consider renewing their membership.

Some members reported an overload of squash and potatoes in the winter, or too many tomatoes and peppers in the summer.  We understand this well, since we sometimes find ourselves wishing that we could make the CSA boxes more diverse at certain times of year.  We can imagine that this winter season for example, many members might be feeling like they are getting too much cabbage and squash.  Full Belly tries to grow as many different fruits and vegetables as we possibly can, but there are windows each year, when there are only a dozen-plus different things to choose from, so we alternate between them one week after the next. Understanding how weather, farming skill, and luck act together to influence the food that can be grown locally and sustainably is a constantly fascinating journey. We are committed to offering a CSA that is sourced just from Full Belly, and we understand that this can sometimes stretch the tolerance of our patient CSA members. [Read more…]

Letter to the Editor

I’ve been meaning to email you and let you know that I’ll be taking a hiatus from veggie boxes for right now. I’ve lived in a condo for the many, many years I’ve been a Fully Belly Farm CSA member and it’s been a lifesaver. I was able to get a garden plot in a local community garden this past year (well, actually, I now have two!) and I’m producing enough veggies at this point that I can’t get through all the FBF veg, even when I went down to every other week.

I’m heartbroken to leave since you’ve a staple in my life for a decade, and I love supporting a farm that I’ve visited, met the farmers and believe in the practices. This feels like more of a dear John letter then just a transaction!

I do hope that I’ll have room in my life (and fridge) at some point to start up again, but I’ve been so lucky with heavy harvests from my garden.

I wish you all the best and will dearly miss the recipes & the produce. The artichokes, the cranberry beans! Those amazing strawberries and the best carrots I’ve ever had. The list goes on. I now love rutabaga, celery root, I can eat kale by the bunch in every form imaginable, I love quince and turnips and fennel fronds – I can’t imagine how much I’ve learned from having the CSA box. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Thank you all so much!

Jaime & Ben

Note: Anyone who is interested can continue to get the Full Belly Beet, CSA member or not.  Just send us your email and we will continue to send it to you — or your friends.