The rewards of CSA membership are great. Learning to eat seasonally, cooking and preserving new and interesting vegetables, celebrating the growing season through special membership events on the farm, and most of all, coming to feel a sense of connection with Hawthorne Valley are all the results of lively CSA membership.

Hawthorne Valley Farm actively works with a number of other growers to insure that you receive the highest quality and widest variety of vegetables in your weekly share. This season, your carrots will come from a number of organic and⁄or biodynamic farms besides Hawthorne Valley Farm, including Fellgarth Farm, Red Fire Farm, and Roxbury Farm. The farmers are friends and, in most cases, neighbors of ours, and we can assure you of the high quality of their production methods. Your potatoes will come from Thompson–Finch farm (who is one of our growers for your fruit share); your string beans are from Markristo Farm. All these are neighboring, certified organic growers who provide the vegetables we find difficult to grow in our soil. Our corn is provided by Kinderhook Creek Farm, also a neighboring grower, although NOT an organic farmer. In addition, those of you interested in fruit shares will be working with many other of our neighbors. In this way, as CSA shareholders, you are helping to support farmers within a whole growing region — farmers using sustainable growing methods. CSA is not like shopping at the supermarket. Your weekly share will be comprised of vegetables grown in season . . . so you may have to wait for a tomato until the high summer months. But you will learn to enjoy a wider variety of vegetables that are in season for the geographical area you live in. And by so doing, you will come into a closer connection with the climate and nature of the Northeast.

By signing up and paying their dues before the planting season actually begins, you allow us to more accurately plan our garden and provide, in advance, the funds to secure seeds and supplies. Yes, you do have some share in the risks, namely due to weather and crop failure, inherent in farming, yet they reap the rewards of bringing home fresh Biodynamically grown produce. The intangible benefit that both growers and members glean from this program is mutual respect and friendship, and a bond is created between producer and consumer, farmer and neighbor, farm and community.