June 20, 2015

We were having a cream cheese crisis. I took the last package of the store bought cream cheese out of the fridge and realized there was only one bagel worth of cheese left. Which meant if we didn’t have any cream cheese, no bagels would be eaten. The farm that distributes our CSA makes a wide variety of dairy products, but cream cheese is not one of them. I had been thinking about going to the new farmers’ market in Gilford, and this was as good an excuse to go as any. I could also do a little research about prices and talk to a few farmer friends I knew would be there. We arrived just about the middle of the market, the opening rush was over, but there were still plenty of things left. It seemed like a busy and well attended market, they had about 18 vendors, live music and a good variety of products for sale. One of the first things I noticed was that everyone seemed more professional since the time we had last been selling at market. All the stands had good clear signage, everything was priced, and the farmers were engaged and talking to their customers.

We looked around at every one's products and then hit the goat cheese vendor. Tristan wanted one of every type of cheese they sold, but with taste testing we narrowed our purchases down to one tub of raspberry cream cheese (score), a piece of cheese in olive oil, and a rosemary spread. This would give us quite a variety for the week, but at 20 dollars total, it was not cheap. There wasn’t anything else we needed so we stopped to talk to a friend, Aaron Lichtenberg, who owns Winnipesaukee Woods Farm http://winniwoodsfarm.com/. He sells at two markets, Gilford and Laconia.  He pointed out the interesting fact that what would sell in Gilford for a high price, say organic free range eggs at 6 dollars a dozen, would definitely not sell in Laconia. Aaron has a CSA which has 60 members, he says that he can hardly produce what he needs to service the CSA and the two markets. This year the problem has been lack of water early in the season and now cold weather and too much rain.  After hearing about our local eating project and that we were subscribers at Brookford Farm he talked about how a lot of farms that are offering CSA shares were experiencing the problem of getting more business than they could handle and not handling their customer service at all well. He believes this is very unfortunate for the farms that are doing a great job because it gives the whole concept of CSA a bad name. What I talked about was the fact that  we went into this project very optimistic about what we would get and that we would be eating just great food, but the reality is different and just three short weeks in, disappointing.

Just a note: while putting up some links that some of you asked for, I went to put up the Brookford Farm link, which is where we get our full diet share from, and their web page is down, due to them not renewing their domain. Someone isn't paying attention.

Some prices, More reasonable than we are paying through the CSA.