We discussed everything we made sure we had in hand in our Before Your First Box: Getting Your Kitchen Ready post. Now its time to discuss getting you and your household ready for the CSA adventure that awaits! We’ve found a few essentials are needed to get you ready for whatever comes!
- Community of Support
- Day of the Box Realities
- Planning to Have a Plan
Community of Support
Our household has two human members and a handful of four legged members. Just the two of us can create disagreements on what we eat, so we imaging having more people with different preferences can be hard to manage. Even still, we found that aligning on our goals for the year (ie, health goals, savings goals, social goals, etc.) put us on a path for healthy conversations. We first heard about a yearly “Couples Goal Setting Retreat” in one of our favorite podcasts, Bigger Pockets. We also enjoy reading, listening to, and watching shows which celebrate food and cooking. We recommend you check some out to keep the motivation up!
The Day of The Box
The good news is that there’s nothing material here to go get. This is our mental, go-get recommendation. Once a week, something like $20 to $35 of your hard earned dollars will be converted into seasonal vegetables. On that day, we accept that part of our time will be spent assessing, cleaning, and storing whatever comes in our box. I typically don’t feel like washing and drying lettuce leaves, but our future selves won’t feel like it either. So, agree now to put on some music, a pod cast, or an audio book and buckle down to business on the Day of the Box.
Plan
Our CSA shares do not cover 100% of the food we eat. They are part of a bigger picture with healthy, local eating habits and the less expensive than eating out option of eating in. Many of our cookbooks will include recipes in which only some of our weekly vegetables as part of the overall menu. The goal isn’t too survive off just the box, but to use the box to inspire our meals, eating through the whole box.
Each Day of the Box, we more or less brainstorm what how we think we’ll eat each item. A grocery list is then formed and we make adjustments as we go. In this blog, we’ll include what we thought we were going to do as well as what ended up happening.
We also started our own vegetable garden. There are many vegetables and fruits that we just can’t get enough of, and for us, it is worth the effort to include a home garden in our overall strategy. Fortunately, we have been growing some vegetables for a few years, and if you keep the habit up, then the overall start-up costs are well worth it.
Going in to the 2020 CSA season, we expect each of these items to be integral to our overall success. Let us know what your keys to success are in the comments below!
CSAeats 