Harvest Share: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

This post should probably be called "Why I'm Not Participating in Harvest Share Next Year", but I did want to share some of the positives as well.

The Good: We got to try a few vegetables that we had never tried before, the produce tasted better and lasted longer because it was so fresh, we got some good recipes each week with our list of produce. Probably my favourite thing about the program was creating the photo project

The Bad: We wasted a lot of food- I tried hard to use everything and freeze what I could, but I still found the personal size boxes too much for just the two of us. I found it was difficult to stuff everything on my fridge on pick up days, and we got a few things that I never would have bought myself, and really didn't enjoy.

The Ugly: I don't really know how to explain this, but as excited as I was to participate in this program, it created a lot of unnecessary anxiety and stress for me. We always had to worry about picking up the basket before the farm closed (they do offer a drop off program for $7/week), I had anxiety about packing everything up to properly store, Chris complained about never being able to find anything in the fridge, I stressed myself out trying to incorporate all of these veggies into our dinner meals, I made some epic disaster dinners just to use the vegetables (hint: celery root soup is a bad idea).

All in all, it wasn't awful, but there are enough lessons learned that I won't be participating again. Next summer, I will be buying my produce from all the local farmers markets and plan to grow a few more things in my garden!

Last 4 weeks of Farm Baskets