CSA

This week, we packed the last CSA boxes of the 2026 season.

After 20 weeks of harvest lists, order forms, washing, sorting, packing, pickups, weekly catch-ups in the barn, recipe conversations, crop updates and watching the season change one box at a time, we have officially reached the end.

There is always something bitter sweet about that last week.

For months, the CSA becomes one of the main rhythms of the farm. We know that every week there are members waiting for what is coming out of these fields. We plant for them, harvest for them, pack for them, and then get to see many of the same faces walk through the barn week after week.

And then suddenly, it is over.

So as we wrap up our 2026 CSA season, I have been thinking a lot about what a CSA actually is, and more importantly, what it means to a little farm like ours.

Because a CSA is much more than a weekly box of vegetables.

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and the idea behind it is pretty simple: instead of waiting until the farm has grown something and then deciding whether to buy it, a group of people commits to supporting the farm before the season begins.

I think of it a little bit like investing in a farm.

You are not buying stock or expecting a financial return. You are investing in the growing season itself. You are saying, I want this farm to exist. I want food grown here. I want to be part of making that possible.

And then, for the next 20 weeks, you get to share in the bounty of whatever that season brings.

Before There Is Anything to Sell

Farming has a strange cash flow.

Long before the first tomato is ripe, there are seeds to order. Seeding soil. Irrigation supplies. Repairs. Farm projects. Fuel. Tools. Greenhouse materials. Labor, lots of labor. Packaging. Equipment that inevitably decides it has had enough right when you need it most.

There are months of work that happen before a farm has much of anything to sell.

We start seeds when the fields still look empty. We prep beds, plant, irrigate, weed, thin, trellis and tend crops for weeks or months before they ever become income. In an orchard, that timeline can stretch much longer.

Most businesses make something, sell it, and then use that income to make the next thing.

Farming asks you to put a tremendous amount of money, labor and faith into a season first and hope that the harvest eventually comes.

That is one of the reasons the CSA model is so powerful for small farms.

When CSA members commit before the season begins, some of the farm's income arrives during the exact period when our expenses are climbing and our harvests are a long way out. That early-season support helps us buy the things we need to actually grow the food that will fill those boxes later.

In a very real way, CSA members help get the season started.

When I am ordering seed in winter or looking across a newly prepared field trying to decide how many beds of carrots to plant, I am not growing into a complete unknown. I already know there are households waiting on the other side of that harvest.

There is enormous security in that for a small farm.

And now, standing here at the end of the 2026 season, I can look back and see that entire arc. From ordering seed and starting transplants to packing this very last box.

Our CSA members were part of that whole journey, even before the first pickup ever happened.

Sharing a Season Instead of Shopping a Grocery List

There is another part of the CSA model that I love, and that is the word share.

Historically, that is what CSA members purchased: a share of the farm's harvest.

That is a little different from walking into a grocery store with a list.

A grocery store is built around consistency. You expect tomatoes, lettuce, carrots and broccoli to be there whether it is August or December. If one farm does not have something, an enormous supply chain works behind the scenes to find it somewhere else.

A CSA works in the opposite direction.

It asks: What is this place growing right now?

For 20 weeks, you move through the season with us.

The early boxes full of greens, and garlic scapes tell you that spring is still hanging around. Then suddenly the summer crops start arriving and the boxes change. Cucumbers show up. Tomatoes begin rolling in. Peppers start coloring. Then the days shorten, the weather shifts again, and the food changes with it.

By the end, you have eaten your way through an entire growing season.

Some crops have incredible years. Some struggle.

Some things we plan carefully for months end up producing beyond anything we expected. Other things fail completely.

That is part of the deal with eating from a farm instead of from a grocery store.

But here at Blue Heron, we do one thing a little differently from a traditional CSA: we let our members choose what goes into their box.

That is actually pretty unusual.

With many CSAs, the farm packs the box for you. Whatever is abundant that week is what you get. Maybe that means bunches of kale, kohlrabi every week, a fennel bulb you have no idea what to do with, and enough summer squash to feed a small army.

That traditional model works beautifully for a lot of farms, but I wanted to do something a little different here.

Every week, our members get to choose from what the farm has available. You are still eating with the season. You are still choosing from what this farm can actually grow here, right now. But within that harvest, you get to build a box that fits your household.

It takes us more work to do it this way. There is more planning, more inventory management, more communication and much more time involved in packing individual boxes instead of making every box exactly the same.

But I think it is worth it.

I really want you to be excited when you open your box.

I want you to see the carrots you love, the peppers you have been waiting for, the tomatoes your family will actually eat, or maybe one new thing you have been curious enough to try. I would much rather put in the extra effort on our end than send you home with food you do not want and hope you figure out what to do with it.

To me, that is another part of building the relationship between a farm and the people it feeds.

We grow with the season, but we also listen to the people eating what we grow.

And sometimes an entire part of the farm has a hard year. We certainly learned that lesson with our orchard this season. We went into spring imagining fruit as a significant part of the year ahead, and Mother Nature had a very different plan.

That is farming.

And that is also where I felt the meaning of Community Supported Agriculture most deeply this year.

After a hard spring, our orchard produced only a fraction of what we would normally expect. For a small farm like ours, that is a big loss. Having an amazing community of people who commit, “We’re in. We’re going to eat with you this season, whatever she gives” provides this little farm a kind of stability that is hard to overstate.

They help make this farm possible.

And Then There Is the Relationship

For all of the practical reasons that CSAs matter, this is still be my favorite part.

I know who eats our food.

That is such a simple sentence, but it means a great deal to me.

Over the last 20 weeks, when we harvested carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants or greens, they were not disappearing anonymously into a supply chain. We knew many of the people they were going home with.

I know who loves the little cucumbers. I know who gets excited when the shishitos come back. I know which kids head straight for the carrots when they walk into the barn.

And our members get to know us too.

They see when we are tired. They hear when a crop struggled. They know when something finally came in that we had been waiting for all summer. They hear us celebrating the good weeks and occasionally muttering about the things that absolutely refused to grow according to plan.

There is something wonderfully human about food moving this way.

Farmer to family. Week after week.

A CSA creates this recurring point of connection between a farm and the people it feeds. Sometimes it is a long conversation in the barn. Sometimes it is a quick hello and a tote bag headed into the car because dinner needs to get made and everyone is running late.

Because magically, almost without noticing it, food stops being completely anonymous.

There is a field connected to it. A season connected to it. A farmer connected to it. A place connected to it.

And on our side of the equation, there is a table connected to it too.

That matters deeply to us.

To Our 2026 CSA Members

Twenty weeks. Gosh, how crazy it is to be standing at the end of the season.

Before anything else, I just want to say thank you. I hope this season brought you joy. I hope you discovered a new ingredient you loved, found a new way to cook something familiar, and had many a meal where you thought, Dang, that was good.

Thank you for trusting us to grow your food.

Thank you for committing to this little farm.

Thank you for walking through the season with us.

And thank you for giving us the privilege of knowing whose tables our food is feeding.

We are so deeply grateful for you.

Want to Join Us in 2027?

If you have been reading along this season and thinking that maybe you would like to be part of the CSA next year, we have opened the 2027 Blue Heron Farm CSA waitlist.

Joining the waitlist does not guarantee a CSA spot. What it does mean is that when we open enrollment for next season, we will offer available memberships to everyone on the waitlist before CSA spots are opened to the general public.

So, if spending 20 weeks eating your way through an Eastern Sierra growing season sounds like your kind of thing, we would love to have you put your name on the list.

Maybe next year, we will get to grow for you too.