Packaging

If you’ve joined our Vegetable CSA over the last couple of years, you may have noticed our lack of packaging.

It’s not how we started, so as we head into our 12th year of production, I’d like to take a minute to share the evolution of our CSA packaging.

We used waxed cardboard boxes our first year (back in 2014).

These rigid containers were a big step up from the bags I’d seen on other farms where veggies are invariably squished and damaged.

But the boxes got dirty through the year and there wasn’t a good way to wash them.

So we switched to these plastic bins that we were able to clean each week.

We only offered full sized shares back then.

Almost all of these bins are still in regular use 11 years later.

In 2018, we started offering small shares using shorter bins.

Inside each bin, we used to utilize lots of plastic bags for items like salad mix, spinach, green beans and more.

We started out with biodegradable bags. Vegetables didn’t keep very well in those.

We switched to plastic for a couple of years, but nobody felt great about that.

(It’s always annoyed me that organic produce at grocery stores usually includes a lot of extra packaging to distinguish it at checkout.)

We also used a lot of paper cartons for items like cherry tomatoes, peas and shishito peppers.

We always offered to take these back for reuse. Only about 1/4 to a 1/3 of them made their way back.

A few years ago, we made some decisions to reduce our packaging waste.

For items like peas, green beans and peppers, we simply make neat piles in the bottom of the CSA bins.

Thus, we encourage you to bring your own reuseable bags/boxes/tupperware through the year.

Or not. Many of you are more than happy to toss all of this into a big bag or basket and sort it when you get home.

We stopped growing some crops that needed their own packaging.

We chose head lettuce over cut salad greens. More slicing tomatoes instead of cherry tomatoes.

And for some crops, we simply changed our growing and harvesting methods.

For instance, spinach used to be picked leaf by leaf and go into a plastic bag.

Instead, we’ve found varieties that grow more upright so that we can cut the whole plant at the base and bunch them.

Same great spinach taste, just packaged differently.

Note we still use plenty of rubber bands for bunching greens and herbs.

You can always return these for reuse at pickup.

We’ve received lots of great feedback about this approach since we made the change.

And we hope you all continue to appreciate the care with which we grow and deliver your vegetables!