The Diet of Worms, Weeks 21-23: Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes!

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last blog post …

Seriously, what have I been doing for the last three weeks?? I blame it on the end of the school year, which gets all clogged up with events ‘n stuff. But it probably has more to do with my spotty work habits when it comes to labors of love, such as my blog, vs. labors I’m being paid for. At any rate, time to pick up the slack.

So, you’ve already heard that worms love Community Supported Agriculture. They should: they get a steady supply of organic veggie material from the trimmings and leftovers from our biweekly delivery of produce. Our family has subscribed to the Be Wise Ranch CSA for almost eight years—hard to imagine it’s been that long already.

Every two weeks we split the contents of a small-sized box (photo top right) with a neighbor up the street. I started splitting it with her sometime during the first year, which made my life so much easier. Without splitting the delivery, we got so much produce, even in the small box, that I was spending an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out how our family of three was going to consume everything. Meal planning wasn’t fun anymore (not that it was ever one of my favorite activities), but felt more like a challenge to see how much of the box contents I could cram into each meal.

Splitting our delivery gave me more leeway in my menus for each week while still leaving us plenty of good stuff. My neighbor also has a small family, so it worked out perfectly.

Large box sample

All that is about to change. I recently got notice that starting in June Be Wise is changing their policy so that there will be only one size box—large—from now on. They haven’t raised their prices in a long time, and in lieu of making us pay more for the same size box, they are just putting everyone on the same plan. This seemed pretty fair, and probably saves some labor costs as well.

At first I thought this wouldn’t be too bad. I could probably accommodate a little more produce each week without too much adjustment.

But then I realized that my neighbor is going to have one fewer mouth to feed starting in the fall when her oldest son leaves for college. As anyone with a teenage boy will tell you, that will make a big difference in the family grocery consumption.

When I told her about the change, she corroborated that will not longer be able to split the box with me. This leaves me two options: 1) finding someone else, preferably right in my neighborhood, to split the new, larger size box, or 2) canceling the CSA subscription. I definitely don’t want to cancel after all these years, but there are other CSAs that have sprung up in the meantime that might be a better fit for our family. I hadn’t looked into them before, since I was very happy with the status quo.

But all good things must come to an end sometime, so my mission for the summer is to figure out what to do. If you live in the San Diego area and have experience with another CSA, I’d be interested in your experiences as I start my research.

As for the worms, here’s the tally for the last three weeks. If it seems kinda’ low that’s because we’ve been eating a lot of meals out. This also correlates to more produce going bad in the fridge. Hopefully I will get my act together and start cooking again so I can take advantage of all the good stuff I’m paying for.

• 1/4 bunch rotten asparagus
• 4 banana peels
• 1/8 bunch bok choy, rotting
• 5 coffee filters with grounds
• 1/4 cucumber, rotting
• 1 ground eggshell
• 3 mango pits and peels
• 1 small brown paper bag
• 1 pineapple rind (don’t know if this is too acidic for the worms. It’s a bit of an experiment)
• 8 rotten strawberries
• 3/4 bunch strawberry tops
• 9 tea bags
• 1-1/8 bunch miscellaneous vegetable trimmings

Photos from the Be Wise Ranch website.