A lot has been going on behind the scenes for the last few weeks, and we’re almost ready to officially launch the Cool Beans CSA for sign-up.
(If you’re visiting for the first time, you might want to start from the bottom up, as the earliest post includes an introduction and explanation.)
We’ve planned garden beds and ordered seeds, visited an accountant, and read far too many CSA contracts from other organizations – I should have stopped about fifty contracts ago, as they’re all beginning to blur. Did you know there are CSAs in many, many countries? For the first time, I’m grateful that I have no other languages, or I would have felt compelled to move on to Europe and Asia after reading the contracts from ones in Great Britain and Australia.
Judi brought an interesting grant to my attention a few weeks ago and we’ve been sidetracked by writing up a proposal which, if accepted, would add some exciting dimensions to our CSA plans; more on that later, I hope! But even if our proposal is not chosen, the work involved in writing it has helped firm up our plans considerably.
Here are a few things we know that we didn’t know when I last posted:
Full shares will be $500. Half shares will be $275. Quarter shares will be $150. We’re recommending a full share if you have 4 or more eaters in your household, a half share for two people, a quarter share for a single, but we don’t know you. You may want a larger share than our recommendation; larger shares are a better value, since we have to factor in additional costs for preparing the baskets and recordkeeping at our end. My son and his wife split a full share from a western PA CSA with their next door neighbors in Pittsburgh, and find that this works very well for both families.
There might be a small discount for beating the payment deadline…..but we haven’t decided when the deadline is. Still a few bugs to work out.
We are not offering work shares this first year. There’s just too many variables: insurance issues, scheduling, management. We’ll revisit the question after the first season. If you buy a share and you’d like to barter work for extras, though…..we’ll talk.
The first pickup/delivery will be on Friday, May 14.
There will be 25 delivery weeks, with one week off in mid August. The final week will be the first week in November. After the official season ends, we’ll maintain contact with our customers if we have additional produce to sell on a weekly basis. (Right now I’m harvesting salad greens from my greenhouse, with outside temperatures in the teens.)
You’ll get an automatic ten percent bump-up in the value of your share, making it, possibly, the best kind of share to invest in this year from a financial perspective! Our goal will be to provide $550 worth of produce over the 25 weeks for a full share, for example.
As is common to all CSAs, each week’s basket will contain a share of the harvest of our two farms. There is a bit of a bell curve to this process: early baskets will be somewhat light and will focus on salad greens. Peas, baby squash, new potatoes, green beans……to everything there is a season.
Additional produce will be available at farmstands at both the Dauphin and Duncannon farms.
We expect to have one East Shore and one West Shore delivery location, and pickup at either farm will be an option. The exact location will depend on customer density. (Demographically. Not, um, personally.)
We’ll have a contract, the distillation of the reading process mentioned above plus item-by-item discussion on our part, for you to study before you make any commitment. A CSA isn’t for everyone. We want you to be sure you want to be in a CSA, and we want you to be sure Cool Beans is the CSA for you. Toward that end we’ll do our best to make everything as clear as possible before you need to make any decisions.
We’ll be donating food regularly to local assistance organizations, and our Cool Beans can be a part of that by donating your weekly basket if you’re on vacation, if you choose. (Or you may make arrangements for a friend to pick up your share that week.) It’s just an option that we’ll explain when the season starts.
In the next two weeks, we’re ironing out some legal wrinkles, writing up our own contract, opening a Cool Beans bank account, and figuring out how to post pictures on the blog! As always, your input is valued, so please contact me (katie@komta.com) if you’d like to comment. From now on, the goal is shorter posts with pictures!
katie