January 2013

This is the first post in a new SGT series that looks at CSA – community supported agriculture – from the farmer’s perspective.

People come to farming from different directions. Some grow up on farms, lugging around seed bags and feed buckets just after their first steps, while others are drawn to the profession later in life, as if it's an avocation they can no longer resist. My partner, Karla Pankow, and I are definitely of the latter group. In 2011, we started our own farming venture, Bossy Acres, and kicked off our first full season last year.

Everyone knows about the new-year, new-you mindset. I mean the idea that, come January 1st of the New Year, we will all dedicate ourselves to becoming radically better people. We will make lists of things we plan to change about ourselves or do differently, and swear that we will “really be committed this time.” Yes, New Year’s resolutions. And for better or worse, Americans make them every year.

This is the third post in our Co-op on a Budget series, which explores the different ways that we can shop co-op effectively and affordably. Also check out the first post, on shopping bulk and the second post, on the Wedge Co-op vs. Cub Foods.

It started with a roadtrip from Southeastern Minnesota, headed west, nearly to the South Dakota border. My sister, Liz Belina, a curious and inventive gardener, had already created a very productive series of raised garden beds outside her back door in rural Peterson, Minnesota. But Liz is a gardener who looks for ways to push the limits of her Zone 4 climate. So when she heard about a tour of an energy-efficient winter greenhouse – one that could be built with materials readily available from a hardware store, heated almost exclusively with stored passive solar energy, and allow her to grow salad greens all winter long – she had to know more.