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Farmers markets are appearing everywhere now, even downtown in the city. We walked over to one at lunch on Thursday. The actual fresh produce is still quite thin, but once the harvesting starts in earnest, I'll be stocking up on all the farm fresh goodies I can. I predict healthier eating for the next few months.

A few years ago we participated in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). The deal is you pay a subscription fee to a local farm, along with many others, and the farm provides you with a trunk load (boot load for those of you in UK) of fresh produce each week. Subscribers pick up the produce at a central location, usually at another subscriber's home, where they have a covered area that is out of the sun, for the farmers to leave the produce. It is a nice way of helping out local farmers. They get the money up front, and we got great produce, and a weekly email letting us know what was happening on the farm that week.

The trouble was, we couldn't keep up with the produce. It was going bad in our fridge. We are only two people, and even the smallest subscription was too much food for us. And neither of us are good about preserving food for winter use. Also, since the produce was a surprise each week, we sometimes got foods neither of like, for example, beets. We did learn to like lots of foods via the CSA, but not beets.

We stopped participating last year and started going to farmers markets instead. It is a bit more of a hassle, and sometimes we get there too late for the best of the best, but at least there are no beets in our fridge.