[Lapg] (permaculture listserve) urban csa trial program: seeking participation from LA permaculture community]

[megan at heartbeetgardening.com]

Urban CSA Trial Program seeking participation from LA Permaculture Community

Heart Beet  Gardening is hoping to diversity its operations into an urban
CSA program.  We have hopeful ideas that this could become a really
revolutionary program for urban edible gardening, but we need to start
small and see if our idea will work.  Please read below about our CSA
trial we're hoping to start in the spring of 09 and email us ASAP at
info at heartbeetgardening.com if you have questions or might want to
participate!

A CSA (standing for Community Supported Agriculture) is another way to
support local agriculture.  Rather than going to the farmer’s market and
shopping for your vegetables every week, CSA supporters subscribe to a
farm on a monthly or seasonal basis, and every week get a basket of their
CSA farm’s vegetables.  CSAs are good for developing locally based
agriculture because they give small farmers greater reliability than
selling their produce at the market. While you can’t hand pick your
vegetables with a CSA, you get a sampling of all your farm has to offer,
giving you knew veggies to try and the certainty that you’ll have plenty
of fresh produce in your house every week.

Heart Beet hopes to use the model of the CSA to expand the way we
accomplish our goal of helping people grow their own food and participate
in a local food system.  A lot the biggest supporters of local agriculture
don’t have the yard space to have their own gardens, and a lot of people
who do have the space don’t necessarily want to commit to putting in a
landscaped kitchen garden. What we’re hoping to do is put these two groups
together in an urban version of community supported agriculture.  Our idea
is that an urban CSA would make truly locally grown produce accessible to
people without yards, and make having your own backyard vegetable garden
even easier for those who do.

Our Heart Beet CSA idea is a grand experiment and we are hoping to get a
trial program started in the spring. To do this we need two kinds of
people: subscribers who want to sign up to get a basket of homegrown
produce every week at a given price), and landowners who want to have
their own vegetable gardens, but are willing to dedicate more space than
they need to feed their own household.

Being a landowner participant in the CSA would be a great choice for
households with lots of yard space and an interest in being able to pick
fresh veggies from your yard, who are also willing to let us make
decisions about what gets planted, and keep their gardens truly simple (no
raised beds, formal pathways, etc.).  There would be some kind of startup
and weekly cost for landowners, but the nature of the program would make
it much less than what it costs for us to design, build, and maintain a
kitchen garden. The benefits of participation would be bounteous homegrown
produce at a low cost, and the knowledge that your garden is feeding not
only you and your family, but other CSA subscribers who don’t have yards
of their own.

Subscribers would get all the benefits of a normal CSA, plus the knowledge
that their produce baskets are truly local, the vegetables coming from a
sampling of Los Angeles gardens.

If you think you might want to participate in our revolutionary trial CSA
this spring, please let us know ASAP!  We are looking for ten potential
subscribers—this can be anyone, but our preference will be for apartment
dwellers and others who really can’t grow their own produce.  For
landowners, we are looking for people who can dedicate a roughly 200
square feet (equivalent to a 14ft by 14ft square) section of their yard
with accessible irrigation to the CSA garden.  If you are interested
please email info at heartbeetgardening.com, and we will let you know what we
are thinking in terms of rates and what we will expect from you.