It’s our third CSA box already! To be honest, S and I still have some veggies left over from our last box, which we received two weeks ago. I blame moving.

Before I show you what’s in the box this week, I want you to look at something else. This is what my backyard (by which I mean the “quad” outside my apartment building) looks like right now:

Moria surveys the drought.

This is what happens when the Madison area undergoes a drought. It’s not pretty. You can see, in the distance, some green grass – that’s where the sprinklers are. But the grass that doesn’t get water is more like straw – it’s yellow, bone-dry, and crunchy. Not good. Unsurprisingly, many small farms in the area are not doing well. CSA farms without proper irrigation aren’t able to provide their share owners with many veggies… and it doesn’t help that we’ve had record heat this summer, upwards of 100 degrees. Luckily, though, my CSA farm has the infrastructure in place to keep its crops irrigated, so my box this week was not at all lacking:

More colors than just green this week!

So – what’s in the box?

• Basil
• Beets
• Bottle onions
• Broccoli
• Cucumbers
• Fennel
• Garlic
• Head lettuce
• Rainbow chard
• Summer squash
• Sungold tomatoes (!)
• Zucchini

Not a bad selection at all. If you can’t tell by that exclamation mark, I’m very excited for the tomatoes. :) Please excuse the shoddy photo, though. I had to take it indoors at 10:00 PM last night because I was out late doing a volunteer project (more about that later).

I’m glad that my CSA is continuing to produce lots and lots of yummy veggies, and I’m glad I invested in it and threw my lot in with my CSA farm. Because that’s really what the CSA model is all about – shared risk and, hopefully, shared rewards. Folks like me who shell out a couple hundred dollars before the growing season even begins in earnest make it possible for our CSA farms to do what they do. We share in their successes, but it also means that we have to share in their failures, too. If my CSA didn’t have the irrigation infrastructure it does, I might have received a very different box yesterday. But that’s just the way it goes – farming is not a guaranteed success (duh), and when we purchase a CSA share, we’re acknowledging that fact.

So what about you? Is there a drought in your area, too? Have you noticed its effects in your CSA share or at a farmers’ market? And, of course, what would you make with these veggies?

Curious about what other folks are getting in their CSA boxes this time of year? Check out the What’s in the Box? link party for this week!