Community farm programs produce offbeat veggies

With community supported farms becoming increasingly popular, more people face the creative challenges of serving up non-mainstream vegetables like bok choi, or less popular ones like okra.

"It's fun. From week to week, you never know what you're going to get," said Marcy O'Hare, as she picked up a delivery in this Albany suburb.

Lined up on a table in a church kitchen were cardboard boxes of lettuce, Swiss chard, squash, tomatoes, cabbage, garlic, cucumbers and beets. A marker board instructs shareholders how much of each item they can take.

O'Hare belongs to a community supported program operated by Fox Creek Farm, which offers 20 weekly deliveries starting in June for $440 a share ($22 per week).

O'Hare likes the fresh, healthy food and supporting local business. Farmers get guaranteed prices for their crops and can sell directly to consumers.

The beneficial arrangements are sprouting up across the nation as the related buy-local and eat-healthy trends pick up steam. The buy-local Web site LocalHarvest lists more than 1,500 community supported farms nationwide.

There are some trade-offs, however. Bumper crops bring overflowing delivery baskets, while bad harvests mean smaller deliveries. Farmers plant a multitude of crops, in part to mitigate that risk.

But in any given year, such farms tie shareholders to the natural rhythms of local agriculture. In the Northeast, members might get peaches in July, corn in August, late-season spinach in September and pumpkins in October.

Fox Creek member Shana Lewis likes the fact that unusual bounties force her to try new food. She would never have gone to the supermarket to buy kohlrabi, but when she received it, she made up a delicious kohlrabi salad with onions and carrots.

Still, there are limits. Lewis said the last such farm she belonged to she got lots and lots of turnips: "I mean mad amounts of turnips," she said.

For offbeat offerings, community supported farms like Fox Creek include recipes in their newsletters. Other farms post recipes online.

Debbie Palmer, the community coordinator for Live Earth Farm south of San Jose, Calif., has collected close to 2,000 recipes online in the past decade.