Welcome to Our Fresh Produce Box Subscription (CSA)
Use the links below to create or manage your CSA account.
Join the CSA Manage My CSA
What is a CSA?
CSA Stands for Community Supported Agriculture
“CSA” is a confusing term. It stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The original CSAs were often started by an individual small farmer in a church group or neighborhood. The farmer would collect up-front funds for seed, fertilizer, and even the cost of the promised produce. In most cases the customers would pick up their boxes at a central location.
Turner Family Farms doesn’t want to just offer you a box of produce. We want to be YOUR FARMER. Our clients are welcome to call or email us for suggestions of crops they would like us to grow, and share recipes for dishes they like to create from our produce. They are welcome to visit either of our farms during operating hours. We even have a couple of clients that like to come out to harvest and fill their own boxes. Every so often we include promotional goodies from our Wilmington area chefs, and other local food artisans. At least once a month we will have videos of our chef friends preparing the ingredients of that week’s box. To sum up, our clients receive:
- A weekly box of naturally grown, local, fresh produce, delivered.
- Access to both the Teachey and River Bluffs farms during operating hours.
- A forum for what you want us to grow and for sharing your cooking skills.
- Instructional videos from our local chefs.
- Promotional items and coupons from local chefs and food artisans.
- Year ‘round fresh produce.
The last item, “year ‘round produce,” is something few farmers can offer their clients. Southeastern North Carolina has a unique climate, such that, with just the use of high tunnels and other season extension devices like row covers, we are able to provide exceptional produce during the winter months.
WHAT’S IN THE BOX?
The Basics and Our Extended Crop List
We have a couple of items that we intend to include in every box – our salad mix and a root vegetable. Our salad mix is a seasonal blend of baby lettuces, spinach, amaranth, frisee, and microgreens. It changes with the seasons but it’s uniquely ours, made fresh weekly. The root vegetables are often fingerling potatoes: Russian Banana, All-Blue, LaRatte, and Austrian Crescent. We also include larger potatoes like Yukon Gold and Red Skin as well as Sweet Potatoes when they are in season.
Past the basics, we pick what is freshest, including tomatoes (both slicer and cherry,) cucumbers, squashes (both summer and winter,) carrots, radishes, and a plethora of greens. Below is a list of what is on our current crop plan for 2018. The list grows all the time.
- Root vegetables with tops whenever possible include: Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, radishes, Asian turnips, beets (several colorful varieties,) and green onions.
- Lettuces and Greens include: Salanova lettuce mix, spinach, collards, sucrine, frisee, mustard, dandelion, fennel, rapini(broccoli raab,) amaranth, beet greens, pac choi, rainbow swiss chard, green, red Russian, and lacinato kales, chicory, and radish and turnip greens.
- “Fruit” vegetables are: tomatoes (all kinds including heirloom,) cucumbers, zucchini and yellow squashes (both regular and patty pan,) melons (Savor and Lambkin,) eggplant, bell peppers, beans and peas, winter squashes (butternut and delicata,) and corn.
- Herbs and Oddities include a short list that is growing all the time: Basil, Dill, Fennel, Mint, Parsley, Thyme and Dandelion.
There are times when we include exceptional items from a handful of partner farms like Humble Roots Farm, Black River Organic Farm, Cottle Organics, Red Beard Farm, and Changin’ Ways, LLC. All of these farmers are both personal friends and/or business partners in the “producer only/no resellers” Wilmington Farmers Market at Tidal Creek.
