Our first CSA pickup from Riverglen Farm!

Yesterday was our first pickup of our veggie box from Riverglen Farm (http://riverglenfarm.ca/intentonal-eaters-community-supported-agriculture/). Over the past few years we have become much more conscientious about what we are eating and where are food is coming from. We are still growing some of our own summer veggies in our back garden - tomatoes, cucumber, zucchini, beans, peas, carrots, peppers, lettuce, spinach, onions and cabbage - our little 12x4 garden patch can actually grow quite a bit! But we decided this year to supplement our garden with a bi-weekly box of organically grown veggies from a local farm - this service is called Community Supported Agriculture. It helps farms sustain their business and it offers your family the freshest and healthiest food options. It is a young couple that run the farm and are trying to make a go of their business. Everyone is so very friendly and really puts an effort into getting to know the people supporting their farm. They are so great with Ewan and he absolutely loves getting to see their animals and people actually working the farm.

Yesterday, our basket of goodies had lettuce, salad greens, peas, onions, garlic scapes, turnips, radishes,  herbs, and swiss chard. The farm also sells eggs year round as well as chicken three times a year - so we also added some farm fresh eggs and three huge chickens to our order. The radishes, turnips and garlic scapes are the three veggies that we are not familiar with so I spent last night coming up with some new recipes to try.

I am excited to be sourcing almost all of our summer - fall foods locally and knowing exactly where our food is coming from and how it is being grown. I think it is a great experience for Ewan seeing exactly how food is produced as opposed to it magically appearing in the grocery store. As well as beginning to understand that different seasons and weather bring around different types of foods. In fact our grocery store trip this morning was so very short and sweet with only one bag of dried goods and we were in and out in only a few minutes.

My only dilemma is how to explain to Ewan that we are eating his beloved chickens. As I was putting the chickens into the cooler, Ewan said "you don't have those chickens over there, right?" I said those chickens over there gave us the eggs that we have and these are eating chickens in the cooler. I didn't have the heart to tell him that we were going to eat the chickens that he had just spent 30 minutes running around and playing with.