Join the first Hyper-Local CSA in the Country!
5 Mile Farms has a member program! Our Community-Supported Agriculture, or “CSA” program, helps us bring you hyper-local, organically grown vegetables on a weekly basis as well as community education and eating events for the whole 5 Mile/Resolution Gardens family like our Greens 101 and herb spiral building classes. Our twelve-location farm comprises two acres and can support 70 members. This member program will allow the farm to expand into unlimited yardspace in neighborhoods all over Austin.
Community Supported Agriculture is a system in which our community members, a.k.a you guys, purchase subscriptions from the farmer that help fund us for an extended period of time. By doing this, you make it possible for us to use the best practices possible in our farming work through generating stable support for our project, and that means that you and yours get the best possible produce along with the best possible sustainable future for our food system. So a CSA is a way for you to ensure your share of farm fresh veggies, connect to a group of like-minded people in the area, learn more about where your food comes from and how to grow some of your own, and help us build the localized, independent, healthy, accessible and ecologically sound food networks of tomorrow.
When you purchase a subscription, you’ll get all of the benefits I’ve got listed below for just 20$ a week! In addition, your subscription will be helping to grow sustainable, local food communities, in your city, in your neighborhood. If you have any questions about the program just reply to this email. You can make your deposit right now with the DONATE button of our parent company www.austingreenart.org.
Farm Forth!
Randy Jewart
Benefits:
- Food: 20$ worth of fresh, hyper-local, organically grown produce that can be picked up Monday through Friday on Resolution farm or Sunday at the HOPE market. Being in the neighborhood allows you to swing by andchoose your produce, instead of getting a box of random items. Right now that could mean 2 bunches of kale, a bunch of rainbow chard, a bunch each of turnips and beets with the greens attached, 2 huge heads of broccoli and 1/4 pound of both spinach and mixed baby lettuce. This list will rotate seasonally. We also routinely make pickled and preserved goods like pickled beets, pickled okra and homemade pesto that could make a great addition to any week’s haul. We also offer farm fresh eggs! (come by and see the chicks!)
- Education: Access to a monthly educational event at Resolution farm. For example, we’ll be hosting classes on composting, pesticide alternatives, native plant choices and companion planting for the home gardener. You’re also welcome to take part in harvesting your own produce, which makes a great activity for those who want to teach their kids a little more about where vegetables come from!
- Community: Access to a monthly eating event at Resolution farm. We’ll cook up some of our own locally grown produce and offer an opportunity to build local community as we all gather around the table.
Cost:
- Membership is 20$ a week and subscriptions last for 13 weeks. A deposit of 40$ is required for the first subscription, which will cover your first two weeks. After that, the weekly price will be automatically charged until the end of the 13 week session. This charge gives you access to everything listed above for that period of time.
- Use the DONATE button on the homepage of our parent company at www.austingreenart.org to make your deposit today!!
Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for special produce discounts, recipes, gardening tips and community info!
Resolution Farm
Hours and Location
5213 Jim Hogg Avenue (map)
Farmstand Hours
Monday, Wednesday and Friday: 10-12 and 3-7
Sunday at the HOPE Farmer’s Market: 11-3
Volunteer Day
Saturday from 10am – 2pm
Produce
Call or email Randy to order or pick up produce.
512-743-4245
randy@resolutiongardens.com
Produce of Summer 2011
Kale – Lacinato
Swiss Chard
Yellow Squash & Green Zukes
Heirloom Tomatoes
Varietal Cherry Tomatoes
Armenian Cucumbers (look funny — taste amazing!)
More about 5 Mile Farms
A year and a half ago Wheatsville helped support Resolution Gardens’ pilot program to create a de-centralized urban farm that lives in homeowner’s yards. We’ve grown from our first 200sf module, to eighty-eight modules – 17,600sf at 6 active sites. You’ve been buying our chard and lacinato kale at Wheatsville during the spring season. We’re proud to announce the formation of 5 Mile Farms! Thanks to Tyson Brown, Chance Carlini, Patti Boyce, Monica Asencio, Mary Ellen Borgelt, Nathan Wilcox, Dave Foster and Matt Risinger (and their families) for making their homes our farm. (Join them!)
When I went to 5th grade in Westlake last year and asked 6 classes of thirty students where their food comes from, they said “plants” — not animals, not farms. Do they see a farm as they move around Austin? I can’t DRIVE to more than a handful, myself.
What if we all moved around our towns everyday and saw farms? Not industrial farms, but small, beautiful, pockets of productive space that were PLACES where people and plants were becoming nutrition (food and $) for the community?
When you see or visit a 5M Farm you’ll be at a neighborhood resource where you’ll find a 5M Farmer who is physically ready to throw down and bust some butt, and probably already is. She is tuned in to the weather and soil conditions. A nurturer of organisms. Thrifty with ALL available materials and resources. He is ready to lend a hand. Constantly problem solving and anticipating next moves to increase fecundity. Someone you want to be in relationship with. What if she was YOU?
The practice of growing food generates cultivation of the community. Because we dig, plant, nurture, harvest and eat, we plan, communicate, share, sell and invest like an ecosystem. 5M increases participation as it decreases consumption. When we produce tangible, edible, healthy food we go “where someone knows our name,” but also VALUES us when we go to the local restaurant or grocery store.
When a yard transforms into a farm, it isn’t private property anymore. It sets of a flow of relationships, education, seeds, money, meals and ideas.
Farming is a platform of activity for more than a lifetime of learning, but anyone can start RIGHT NOW with a shovel and a willingness to share. The 5M model allows for the potential to construct hundreds of thousands of farms in Austin alone with basic tools and wholesome materials (compost, seeds, rainwater barrels). We could create jobs in the organic, hyperlocal food sector for thousands of under-educated, economically and most-likely, racially marginalized community-members instead of sending them to dead-end jobs cleaning toilets or frying chemically-laden death-burgers to their neighbors at fast food industries.
5M will build a new retail infrastructure for the movement of produce in neighborhoods that incorporates an online component and a scale and walking and maybe no cash at all.
5M is a meme, and a replicable business DNA that will allow every community in the industrial world to grow hyperlocal produce and neighbors.
Let’s walk to that farm because it’s in our front yard. Let’s be those people because a farmer is the best neighbor — the steward of health for herself, his family, the organisms we relate with because we eat them and depend on them, and our community.
Because we build that PLACE in your yard, and we PRODUCE that FOOD with that WORK with these PEOPLE we will have true HEALTH. We’re cultivating for ourselves a FEELING of connectedness where our life and our time MEANS something real and important. And what we GIVE in time and money and sweat comes back in food, relationships and knowledge.
At our little 5M project in Austin we FEEL it because we ARE it. It’s not a picnic. It’s not utopia. It’s us and the work we do to eat together today.
Join us every Saturday at Resolution Farm at 5213 Jim Hogg Avenue from 10 – 2pm for volunteer day.
-Randy
