Our farm has a large retail base: countless farmers’ market customers, a 200-family winter CSA, and a 320-family summer CSA. I love these supporters for their loyalty and their contributions to farm profit, but dread the amount of time I must spend in answering all the questions from this many people. Above all, two queries take the longest whenever we have new customers or new crops: “How do I cook this?” and “How do I store this?”  The last thing I want to hear at the farmers’ market – when the line is 10 people deep, and I’m interacting with customers at lightning speed with people wanting to buy from us – is the person at the head of the line asking “Do you know any good recipes for tomatoes?”  Or, “How do I store the mesclun?”  While the questions at the farmers’ market are unavoidable, I am able to minimize the hours spent communicating with CSA members by emailing our farm cookbook with recipes and cooking tips.  And to keep that farmers’ market line moving fast enough to keep all customers with us until they’ve bought our foods, we print this cookbook to display for and sell to the customers while they wait in line. Over the years, this has lengthened, evolved, become slicker, and finally this year the cookbook was borne anew with a partnership with a treasured chef-buddy of mine, Julia Shanks.

Based on our experiences as chefs and my years spent marketing our produce, we created this storage chart (next two pages) which can answer most of the storage questions that direct-marketing farmers need to answer.  We offer this to you, to use and distribute to your customers.
 And to answer the inevitable, “How do I cook this?”  Julia and I draw on our 35 years of restaurant cooking experience. We are now proud to offer customized farmers’ market and CSA cookbooks to farmers, market managers, or CSAs at very reasonable costs. The cookbooks, which include recipes and the very useful storage chart, are tailored to focus on the specific crops that a given farm grows.  The recipes are easy enough for retail customers too busy with the rest of their lives to trouble with complexity or hard-to-find ingredients.  For more information on the customized cookbooks that help you minimize the time you communicate with customers, so you can devote more time to what you love – farming – visit our website at www.CSAcookbooks.com or email info@CSAcookbooks.com. Click here if you would like to down load the Storage Chart for Fruits and Vegetables

Brett Grohsgal farms at Even’Star Farm in Lexington Park, Maryland.