Think Spring
Philly’s top chefs and their seasonally inspired menus planted the seeds for the recent trend toward buying and eating local. New farmers’ markets are sprouting up all over, and grocery stores offer local produce. But serious locavores are signing up for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Here’s the dirt: For a fixed price, paid in advance, a local farmer gives you a share of whatever’s ripe each week of the growing season — seasonal fruits and veggies bred for taste, not shelf life, that you pick up at the farm or at sites throughout the region. What you give the farmer is the security of payment before the growing season begins. Here’s our list of the area’s leading CSAs.
Sign up soon for those tomatoes in August; shares go fast. — Bridget Salmons
Illustration, Kirk Caldwell