4 min

Shared Legacy Farms CSA and buying or growing local produce

my Jul 23, 2014 TT comment
http://toledotalk.com/cgi-bin/tt.pl/article/180151/19Jul2014/Sweet_Corn/21#180387

We were members for the first five years of Shared Legacy Farms, which is the Community Supported Agriculture, created by Corinna and Kurt Bench out in the Elmore area. This is their seventh year of operation.

We picked up our boxes or bags of produce on Thursday evenings at the Perrysburg farmers market from approximately mid-June to mid-October.

We signed on for the vegetable share and the fruit share. Later, they added an egg share, which we also subscribed to. And they have added additional shares since for items such as honey and syrup.

Types of shares and the prices:
http://www.sharedlegacyfarms.com/our-csa/our-products/

You take what Shared Legacy Grows and provides in the boxes each week. We didn't pick. It's not like shopping at the farmers market. But sometimes on pick-up day, they would have extra produce that members could take, so I would load up on eggplant.

In the early days, Kurt experimented with different produce items to see what people liked. We got to try new things that way.

We enjoyed it, but eventually our household became only the two of us, so it was tough to keep up with all the produce. We canned, froze, and ate it, but sometimes, we got behind in our consumption. Plus, we expanded our backyard garden, and we found it easier to shop on Saturday mornings at the Toledo farmers market than make a swing out to Perrysburg on Thursday evenings.

Shared Legacy Farms added additional drop-off locations later.

If you want to try it next year, the half share is a good idea. Or get a full share and share it with a neighbor.

Kurt grows the vegetables, but when we were members, he gathered the fruit portion from other farmers.

It was fun to watch Kurt and his staff grow their CSA. Each winter, Kurt added new equipment or expanded something. I still follow them on Facebook.

We were members during their first year when I think they only had a dozen or so members. Kurt worked at another job while maintaining the CSA, but eventually, he obtained his goal of growing the business large enough to farm full-time.

From their website:

2013 was an exciting year for the Benches. With the help of hundreds of families in the Toledo area standing behind them, Kurt and Corinna made a huge leap of faith and became full-time farmers. In their first year in 2008, they started with only 12 customers, and have managed to double in size every year since.

Shared Legacy Farms CSA offers several membership share options for 2014. We have 200 vegetable shares, 100 fruit shares, and 75 egg shares available this year.

I think they sold out of all their shares, but I'm unsure. Obviously, they are doing well.

Shared Legacy Farms also supplies produce to some local restaurants, such as Element 112, and eventually Fowl and Fodder.

Kurt or someone from Shared Legacy Farms usually has a booth on Saturday mornings at the Toledo farmers market, where they sell their extra produce. Kurt was downtown last Saturday. So we still get to enjoy Kurt's farming operation.

When we were members, they held one or two special events each summer at their farm. The CSA is definitely a good way to become friends with "your" farmer.

This year, I expanded our backyard garden some more by turning it into a raised bed, square-foot garden with over 100 squares jammed into our tiny lot.

I think that being a member of the CSA and knowing Kurt has inspired us to do more gardening and canning and to shop year-round at the Toledo farmers market, trying to buy local produce as much as possible.

And it's good to see more local restaurants adopt the farm-to-table idea.

Of course, if you don't have time for shopping and gardening, you could try Soylent:

Soylent is an open sourced nutritional drink. Its creator, software engineer Rob Rhinehart, researched nutritional requirements and developed the formula by self-experimentation based on his own research online and through textbooks, and scientific journals.

A commercial version of Soylent has been financed by a crowdfunding campaign and venture capital which raised funds in excess of US$3,500,000. The funding paid for additional research and modification of the formula. The first shipments of U.S. orders began in the first week of May 2014.


We've used the microwave to cook sweet corn for several years. We got the tip from Corinna.

  • leave sweet corn in husk
  • place sweet corn in microwave
  • heat on high for two minutes
  • let cool a bit before removing the husks

The smaller sweet corn in the late season require less microwave time.

In September or October, the sweet corn may contain a caterpillar at the top under the husk.

#food - #farming - #toledo - #business

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