Sideways

I mention this stuff in comments on others' blogs, so I thought I'd clarify it here.

For the last three years I've gotten my produce from Windflower Farm, an absolutely lovely garden-farm in Alfalfa. It's a CSA. I send them a hefty check in April, and then once a week from May-October I get a bag of vegetables and herbs. I like Windflower Farm because it's continually astonishing that she can grow such a wide variety of crops in the desert and for such a long period of time; because I like to eat along with the desert's seasons; because her farm is beautiful; and – ultimately – because I like what she delivers. (Herbs! So many herbs! I dry them and use them all year. I dry them and give them as Christmas presents.)

I also like Windflower Farm's vegetables because they still look like a piece of a plant. The lettuce has roots, the carrots and radishes and turnips have tops. I have to wash the dirt off – and once a year, seems like, I get a caterpillar. I just love that; I don't know why; a caterpillar among store-bought lettuce would be horrifying, but in my CSA veggies it's somehow part of the story.

Bend has a few other CSAs now and also some small farms which allow a person to order produce on a week-by-week basis. I'm loyal to Windflower Farm, but since she's closed for the season, today I bought a 1/2lb of lettuce from Red Tail Farm, which apparently has a giant greenhouse out Tumalo way. It is fab-u-lous. It is to Safeway lettuce what a garden tomato is to a Safeway tomato.

During CSA season I get weekly eggs from Windflower Farm, too, but only 1/2 dozen. That's not enough for my family; so this year I have also been buying eggs from various nearby farms and ranches: Dancing Cow Farm, Great American Egg, and today Red Tail Farm. Fresh eggs cost nearly twice as much as store-bought eggs but the dollar figure is still low (eggs are cheap protein!) and I tell you, they look different and taste different from store-bought eggs. The yolk is a completely different color. It turns batter orange-y. Also the shells are beautiful.

What else? Oh, Windflower Farm offered a cheese share this year. Every other week I got two little bricks of Redmond's Juniper Grove Farms' goat cheese along with my vegetables. We all like their hard cheeses but the soft cheese is too stinky for anyone else, so I ate it all myself! (I probably will not do the cheese share next year. Goat cheese strikes me as a luxury good, hard to justify. (Please, feel free to change my mind!))

Great American Egg also sells truly astonishing bacon (jowl bacon! Who knew such a thing existed?) and twice now I've bought a whole chicken from them. Oh and also when I visited that farm last, they talked me into some butter which was made by a neighboring farm. It was a deeper yellow than ordinary butter and tasted just a little cheese-ish. Good stuff.

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You know what I really like about buying directly from a farm or ranch? I like the story.

I like that I've seen the places where the food grows or is raised and met the people who work so hard there. I like that when I crack an egg, I can actually picture the hen in my mind; I remember seeing it, or one of its cousins, walking through the grass and making that lovely cooing sound. I remember watching my children chase after those hens, laughing and sort of – I don't know – pleased with the otherness of the birds.