CSA goes ‘beyond organic’

FALLS VILLAGE — Spring is springing and for Janna Berger, field manager of Adamah, the farm division of the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center in Falls Village, that means getting ready for the fifth year of its CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. “We’re planting in greenhouses and in the fields,” Berger said. “We’ll grow vegetables, fruits, herbs and salad greens — all certified organic — for about a hundred ‘share’ customers.” Berger has worked on similar farms for seven years and is in her second year of managing the one at Adamah. She is excited about the farm’s new tool, an antique tractor, originally built in 1949, that will allow them to work the acres more efficiently.Adamah offers vegetable shares that must be paid for in advance of the season, and which come in baskets that can be picked up, once a week, from the retreat’s refrigerated lockers. The cost works out to $25 per week for a 23-week season, approximately what a small family would spend on produce at a supermarket. People who have taken past shares cite the quality, consistency, variety and cleanliness of each week’s haul. The produce ranges from arugula to zucchini, with about 40 other vegetables, fruits and herbs. These include old standards such as lettuces and peppers, and a few veggies that most supermarkets do not carry, such as kohlrabi, which looks like a vegetable octopus and is used raw in salads and cooked as a side dish, and small spring turnips that taste very different from the larger, more fully grown turnips found at most groceries. Berger reports overhearing the child of one “share” couple asking her parents what sort of “treasures” they would obtain in their next trip to Adamah. Last year, fewer than a dozen local shares were bought; another five dozen were taken by families in the Hartford area, to which Adamah makes weekly deliveries. Berger hopes to expand the number of local shares, which go for $575 per season, and can be purchased at www.isabellafreedman.org/adamah/csa. “Whatever is not picked up each week, we donate to local food banks,” Berger said.Adamah’s farming practices are beyond organic. “The certification of ‘organic’ allows things we wouldn’t do,” Berger averred, such as the use of certain pesticides. Pest control at Adamah’s 10 acres is done through pre-treating the soil with compost and cover crops that produce the right amounts of nitrogen and other nutrients. “Well-treated soil usually deters pests,” Berger pointed out. “So does planting a large variety of seeds — the bugs prefer monocrops.” Should insect pests become a problem anyway, Adamah resorts to a “clay spray” that encases stalks and leaves in pottery armor, which foils the insects. Adamah uses a sophisticated computer program, developed through years of work by CSAs around the country, to direct the planting, feeding, fertilizing and harvesting of its produce. When there is a big problem — floods, last year, severely cut into the production in the fall — Adamah works collaboratively with other CSAs to fill in the gaps and provide enough quantity and variety for its weekly boxes. The farming program is integrated into the other programs of the Isabella Freedman retreat on Johnson Road. At “farm days,” twice a year, city folks and even some locals are introduced to organic farming, the cultivating of goats and pickling. The farm’s popular pickled beets, green beans and cucumbers can be bought as a separate share, or individually at local supermarkets; the goat dairy products are also available at Adamah as a separate share. New, this year, are June and August farm stays, in which the retreat essentially becomes a farm-based B&B. Although Isabella Freedman is a Jewish facility, Adamah produce shares are taken by people of all faiths and degrees of love of vegetables. There are other CSAs in the Northwest Corner and in nearby New York and Massachusetts, such as the Chubby Bunny Farm, also in Falls Village, and farms in Cornwall, Goshen, Wassaic, Sheffield and Great Barrington, all of which offer shares to the public at approximately the same season price.