A Fresh Start With Community Supported Plant Starts

Eating locally doesn’t have to be a hassle. Many Seattle residents already have local produce delivered right to them, through a share in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Now, you can apply the same convenience to your own food garden, by having seasonal vegetable seedlings delivered to your door. This very program is possible thanks to Cascadian Edible Landscapes.

The innovative program, a playoff of Seattle’s already popular CSA program, is Community Supported Plant Starts (CSPS). Consumers can now take their locavore efforts one more step closer to home, without breaking the bank (according to their numbers, growing your own produce with CSPS could save you 75 percent of what you’d spend on supermarket veggies). As the name suggests, CSPS works in a similar fashion as a CSA, but instead of receiving fresh produce, you receive a grower’s flat ready for your garden. In a sense, the flats provide beginner or skilled gardeners with already thriving vegetable gardens by supplying seasonally appropriate (and healthy) produce at the right time, while providing assistance along the way. CSPS was born in light of Cascadian Edible Landscapes’ effort to transform Seattle’s front and backyards into gardens capable of meeting the food needs of Seattleites.

Eating locally helps to solve the vast problems tied to food, especially those associated with Food Miles (and thus global climate change). Backyard food is as local as we can get and CSPS makes this readily accessible by simplifying the process. Oh, and did I mention the incredible freshness and taste associated with eating locally?

If you would like to get started or learn more, head over to eatyouryard.com. Make sure to shoot an email to stephanie [at] eatyouryard.com, subject line CSPS, for more information and order forms.

Read more on eating locally in our archives:

• How-to: Eat Local
• Eat Really Local
• Finding Out Where Your Food’s From: The Food Map

Source: Article by Bryan Mitchiner, reprinted courtesy of World Changing Seattle

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