Community Supported Agriculture

I was set to pick up my portion of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) from The Daily, a small eatery just North of the King St. overpass, but trouble with the past weekend’s thousand year flood led to a rough start to the Fall season for Pete Ambrose of Ambrose Farm. He and his farmhands worried constantly as to whether they would be able to weather the storm. Luckily, to his benefit the clouds eventually cleared, and the sun once again shown on his field of crops. With the delay, what would have been a Tuesday afternoon delivery turned into a Friday afternoon delivery, but I was no less appreciative of the bounty of produce that would be awaiting me.

As I pulled into The Daily’s parking lot I happened to run into Ambrose’s delivery driver Nick, we chatted briefly about the past weekend’s events, and it seems that the farm suffered minimally in comparison to the Peninsula and other parts of the state. The marshes that exist throughout John’s Island (where the farm is located) aid in diverting the water away from land. This is a natural filter many areas in the lowcountry lack, due to previously beneficial marshes being filled in for land development.

When I entered The Daily, I was delighted to find a wall full of brightly colored reusable totes filled with a fresh harvest. On the bags was the Ambrose logo of a tomato and the question of “Who’s your farmer?” It’s an interesting question to pose in today’s society with most food exchanging upwards of a hundred hands in its life span. The hundreds of thousands of miles that food travels in today’s food system leaves many consume’s with a laundry list of questions about where it comes from, and the methods that go into its growth. This is why a CSA is such a beautiful thing. You have the ability to meet the person who is growing your food, find out how they’re growing your food, and make sure every penny that you spend on produce is going directly to them. Its a wonderful system.

In this weeks bag I received a plethora of goodies including: malabar spinach, bell peppers, shishito peppers, red radishes, okra, green peanuts, white sweet potatoes, and string beans.

As of yet, my plans are to roast the peanuts, which requires that I soak them in a salt solution overnight, and bake them. I hope to mix up a salad with the spinach and red radishes, and pan fry the okra. As for the bell peppers and white sweet peppers, I’ll use them in a breakfast hash, and the string beans will work nicely as a side dish to my next potluck.