This morning, I moved a dozen trays of seedlings off of the heating pad where they spend the night, and out into the sun, before I weeded between a hundred or so rows of lettuce, rolled up the sides of the high tunnel (a greenhouse heated solely by sunlight) to keep the tomato and pepper plants from getting too hot, picked rocks out of the new field where the pumpkins will be, wrestled with a roll of irrigation hose, and tried to catch a cabbage looper moth with my hat.

This summer is my third on the Bee Thankful Farm, a CSA in Deerfield. A CSA (Community Supported Agriculture, or Community Sponsored Agriculture) is a farm where individuals or families in the community buy shares at the beginning of the season, and receive equal portions of each harvest. The forty shares in the Bee Thankful Farm all include classics like lettuce, tomatoes, and strawberries, as well as honey from the farm’s bees. They also include vegetables that many shareholders weren’t familiar with before, like mustard greens, malabar, yukina savoy, “Nero Tondo” radishes, purple mizuna, and pak choi.

“I like to try to give people a few things they haven’t really seen before,” Nick Karakoudas, who owns the Bee Thankful Farm, often says. Nick, who taught high school biology at Pinkerton Academy for six years, now educates the CSA members. As well as introducing us to new varieties of produce (and, thankfully, tips on how to eat them), he’ll often bring new members into the fields to show them what a broccoli plant actually looks like. Then he’ll let them know that broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower are varieties of the same species. When someone notices at pick-up how much softer the strawberries or the tomatoes are than their supermarket counterparts, Nick explains how most produce has been bred to ship well instead of taste good; this is also what he says when a member tells him how surprisingly flavorful something is. And he brings attention to the connections between plants and animals, attributing at least part of the credit for the incredibly sweet muskmelons to their pollination by his bees – or “the girls,” as he calls them.

In these three summers, I’ve learned to recognize dozens of plant and insect species; how to tell if a melon is done growing or a beehive is about to swarm; that potatoes grow not from the roots but from the stem of the plant; that brussels sprouts have to be planted early and should be picked only after there’s been a frost; and countless other things that I would never have known about food and where it comes from. And as a CSA member, I’ve learned that local, responsibly grown, delicious food can actually cost less. Although a share cost under $500 last year, a share’s worth of produce at the end of the 23-week season was valued at $710 by New Hampshire farmers’ market average prices.

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