Walking With Watermelons
Longtime CSA Member Kit Gordon recounts picking up her CSA share with her daughter.
“It was always a fun thing to do, because we would either ride our bikes, or she would be on the trail bike, typically, because it’s a bit of a hill coming back, or we’d hike, and we’d each have a backpack, and we’d come down and put all our things carefully in the backpack and start heading back. We’d always get hungry or tired or whatever on the way back, and we’d always stop and then start rummaging through to see what we had to eat. I remember just peeling open the corn right there on the trail.
I was getting a double share, which sometimes a double share would be two watermelons.
This one time it was one gigantic watermelon, and it was so big and so heavy I couldn’t even get my arms around it. I’m walking home on this trail and I’m thinking, I can’t make it’s too big and too heavy! I thought, What if I just leave it here? What would happen? So it was a long way home carrying a gigantic watermelon, and that’s when I started reading the list of what might be coming before I decided to walk to get my vegetables!”
Tomati- who?
Transcribed from a conversation with Sally Kadifa, longtime CSA Member.
I already had a relationship with Hidden Villa from my parents and their philanthropic endeavors, kids that’d go to summer camp there, and I took my Girl Scouts out there. Years later when my friend Jen moved out here and was farming there, I asked her what to do at Hidden Villa. She told me about farm share and we signed up. That was 11 years ago, wow!
At the time, I thought, okay, we’re just going to get these nice vegetables, that’s great! But, it really was more of a life-changing experience. I grew up in the Midwest on a Midwestern diet. We didn’t eat a lot of green leafies. We didn’t eat a lot of root vegetables. We just didn’t, you know. I’d never really eaten food that I knew who grew it, and I knew Jen was up there every day harvesting this.
I don’t want to be over the top here, but the CSA kind of changed my relationship with food. Eating something that I knew somebody had grown for me, I didn’t want to waste any of it! We didn’t want to waste a single bite of it. We found something to do with all of it.
Sometimes, I didn’t even know what it was, you know. I was really grateful for those little notes in the CSA newsletter telling us what was in the box and what to do with it. One vegetable in particular, I didn’t know. I had never seen a tomatillo before. I got those in the box, and they came with this recipe for salsa verde. Now I just kind of laugh, but at the time, I had never made salsa, and we made it! That sort of led to making enchiladas. It opened a lot of doors. Now not only do we enjoy our Hidden Villa produce, but now we shop most weeks at the farmers market. It really, fundamentally changed the way we eat.
Proud Partners
Tom Meyers, Executive Director of Community Services Agency Mountainview shares his enthusiasm for a strong partnership.
My name is Tom Meyers, I’m the executive director at Community Services Agency Mountain View, (CSAMV) and I am a member of the community-supported agriculture at Hidden Villa. One of the things that I am the most proud of is something that started about 20 years ago, and that’s the partnership between Community Services Agency and Hidden Villa. It began with a conversation about 21 years ago. I was asked, “Would CSAMV like some overage from the farm at Hidden Villa? And I said, ‘Absolutely, let’s, let’s make that happen!”
Fast forward 20 years, and we still get deliveries regularly from hidden villa. This, amounts to 10s of 1000s of pounds of food every year, and this is an incredibly important partnership. CSA relies on food donations from the community, from Second Harvest Food Bank, grocery stores, and so forth. But one of the relationships I’m the most proud of is our relationship with Hidden Villa, so much so that my husband and I are members of the community-supported agriculture program at Hidden Villa. We get a weekly delivery of produce from Hidden Villa, and it is put to good use. So I can’t say enough good things about the partnership between Community Services Agency Mountain View and Hidden Villa, but also I can’t say enough good things as a member of the CSA at Hidden Villa. It’s a great partnership that I’m very proud of.“
MORE HIDDEN VILLA STORIES
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From Horses to Harvest
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Remembering Summers at Hidden Villa
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A (Volunteer) Jack of All Trades
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First Day of Work with HVEEP
A story about Lynne Stietzel
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A Lesson From Delano
Story recounted by Tom Lederer