Baltimore Farmers' Market – May 10, 2009

The farmers' market in downtown Baltimore is open again. I look forward to buying and cooking with local organic produce each spring. I have read many articles that indicate that fresh local produce has much more nutrition than conventionally grown produce that travels many miles to our local stores.

Our CSA subscription at Calvert Farm begins next week. If you haven’t tried a CSA you should look for one near you. This is the third year we have belonged to a CSA and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. If you are unfamilar with CSA's I will try to explain how they work. We have belonged to two different CSA's. What they had in common was that you paid for your food at the beginning of the season and then received your percentage of the crop each week. The first CSA we belonged to distributed the same produce to every member each week. You would go to the farm and weigh out the produce according to the posted amount. The nice part of this methodology is that you were introduced to varieties of produce that may have been different than what you would normally purchase. Our current CSA delivers to locals stores and farmers' markets and you get a specific number of shares each week. From your shares you pick what you want. We choose our current CSA because it was more convenient and we were buying from them everyweek anyway, so it minimized our total number of shopping miles and time.

Our current CSA is organic and always has a fantastic variety of produce. Every week is fascinating to see what Pam at Calvert Farm brings to the market. This week the farm had a number of beautiful potted herbs as well as wheat grass. We bought baby spinach and arugula as well as a nice bay plant. Expect to see recipes using fresh spinach and arugula in the next couple of days. I have included a couple of photos of the vegetables. The color on the plants, veggies and flowers this week was fantastic.



This is a photo of the local organic rhubarb that was available this week. Aren't the colors beautiful?




I couldn't resist taking a photo of the purple and green of the spring onions.