This is what seasonal looks like

Spinach. Again. Walking onions, green garlic, radishes, and kale. A curly head of lettuce from the greenhouse. Nice to have rhubarb—so early this year.

Welcome to the season’s first community-supported agricultural shares on Colorado’s Front Range.

When members join a CSA, it doesn’t take long to figure out that eating locally and seasonally isn’t like shopping at a grocery store. Variety and availability is determined by the climate—temperature, day length, precipitation, zone, and weather influence what can be planted and when. After winter’s frigid temperatures, the soil needs time to warm up before most crops can be seeded. Even when spring days are sunny and warm, nights remain cool. The last frost of the winter can hit in March, April, or even May. Until all chance of frost has passed, tender crops can’t be planted. Moisture is another variable: too much and seeds rot in the ground; not enough and they don’t germinate.

All these factors and more determine what’s ready in the Stonebridge barn each week. From early May until mid-June, the share is limited because fall-planted or perennial plants are still waking up from the winter. At Stonebridge, the season starts a month earlier than most CSAs in our area because our members are ready for early spinach and fresh lettuce. From kale to rhubarb, anything else is a bonus in those first unpredictable weeks.

In Colorado, we say if you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute. Change will come. The same is true in eating seasonally. When we’re tired of the same early crops, the brassicas—cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage—started in the greenhouse and transplanted to the fields in early spring soon join the line-up, along with baby beets and carrots seeded in May’s still-cool soil. Peas—so much work but such a treat—show up next in the barn; many of them don’t make it home but get eaten on the drive instead. Spring-planted spinach comes on as winter-over spinach begins to bolt. Kale and chard are both raring to go. All those greens take getting used to but, as our doctor says, eating greens “is like eating health.”

Once the summer squash and cucumbers need picking every other day, the garden’s bounty has arrived. Garlic is harvested and given every week. Beans beg for picking as beets and carrots become Saturday regulars. The show-offs of the fields—tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant—make their many weeks’ seeding, weeding, and tending worth it. Even people who think they don’t like eggplant admit that a fresh one is a whole different matter.

Come August, farmers are busy harvesting and members are busy cooking, canning, drying, and freezing with help from our weekly recipe list (stonebridgefarmcsa/recipes). This plentitude won’t slow down until the temperatures cool again. When first frost threatens, high summer crops are pulled for the barn; the pepper “pick-down” yields plenty for freezing, too. After frost nips the vines, winter squash and pumpkins are harvested in a hand-to-hand relay from the fields to the hay wagon and the hay wagon to the barn. Onions come in from the fields to cure, leaving autumn’s Asian and other greens, roots like rutabagas, carrots, and turnips, and whatever’s stored in the barn to fill the end-of-season shares.

Repetitious? Sometimes. Unpredictable? That’s farming. But people who hang out at a CSA learn to treat vegetables like old friends. Ah, how wonderful to see you again! It’s been a year since we last met. You’re looking well. I can hardly wait to make that soup/salad/dip/dessert I only make each spring/summer/fall.

Seasonal eating has its challenges. In any given year, one crop will shine and another will lack luster. Especially in Colorado, no week can bring the amount or variety of vegetables available at a grocery store. We hope the benefits of supporting local agriculture outweigh that inconvenience. Fresh is a flavor; fresh-picked veggies just taste better. Not to mention the value of keeping local land in organic agricultural production through participation in a community-centered, reciprocal effort. As we say at Stonebridge, when the community feeds itself, the land and the people prosper.

Eating seasonally brings surprises, satisfactions, and delights. It also brings disappointments and, sometimes, failures. Good thing farming is forgiving. Each season, we get to try again.

If you’re a new CSA member, learning the season’s rhythms takes time. If you give it a chance, one day that shift will occur. From kids learning to eat vegetables to members anticipating the next crop, we’ve seen that magic in the barn as “Spinach again???” becomes “Yippee, spinach again!!!”