CSA Reports
LexFarm 2026 CSA Highlights
Another amazing CSA season has come and (almost) gone! While we’re just starting the fall CSA, this time of year marks a change in pace for us that cues a time of reflection and planning. As a CSA customer, we thought we’d give you a sense of what our season was like through some facts!
Summer Vegetable CSA
It was a bit daunting going into this season after we had such a relatively hard season last year. We suffered many larger crop failures (eggplant, tomatoes) and it took a bit of a hit to our morale. Although the 2025 CSA still met its value, we relied more than usual on bought in produce to help us get there and we weren’t able to provide as much overflow of abundance as we would like. That being said, the 2026 season successfully boosted our morale and was above and beyond what we had hoped!
Crop reports:
Our best crops this year were eggplant (we tried two new varieties outside of our usual Asian and Italian eggplants, and we LOVED them – hopefully you did too!), tomatoes (over 2 lbs in the share the first week of August?! Thank you hoop house tomatoes!), and winter squash (over double our highest yield ever – 4,133 pounds!). If you were a 20 week shareholder, you received almost 16 pounds of eggplant and 23 pounds of tomatoes over the course of the season! We had lettuce for 15/20 weeks of the season, and lots of it was huge! We grew endive for the first time, and some of you loved it. We also grew green cabbage for the first time, and it was glorious – we were so happy to be able to provide it as a choice with our napa. We also had 8 weeks each of cherry tomatoes, green beans, and basil in the PYO. We have plans for how to achieve higher yields of peppers next year, especially shishitos and poblanos! Of course, we had some losses – our ginger which performed beautifully last year did not make it, and we had to sacrifice our summer and storage carrots. We’re grateful to partner with other farms, especially Next Barn Over in Hadley, MA, to supplement our shares with crops that don’t make sense for us to grow or that just do badly.
The numbers:
The summer CSA this year was a total of $866 worth of produce. If you include the $70 in farmbucks, your share was worth $936, which is $141 more value than the base price of the share. For half shares the value came out to $437, $47 more value than what you paid for including farmbucks, and the odd week and even week value came out equal to the dollar (I have to boast as it’s something I pride myself on succeeding in almost every year!).
All in all, it was a beautiful share! We hope you felt the abundance as much as we did this year.
Spring CSA
We had another great Spring CSA! We successfully spread our plantings of greens out more to try to give you a wider variety of greens throughout the season. We provided hearty portions of lettuce heads/lettuce mix, arugula, spinach, braising mix, as well as carrots and beets towards the end. With the help of Brookford Farm in Canterbury, NH, we were really able to bolster this share by adding potatoes, celeriac, asparagus, and more. It has been a journey for us to figure out having prolific spring greens indoors while still giving our summer crops the time and space they need to get established inside, and we haven’t quite cracked the code. But we have figured out how to provide beautiful spring greens during a time when we’ve all been subsiding on winter kale and spinach for months. We’re grateful to have indoor growing spaces that make this possible!
Flower + Dahlia CSA
Wow – what a year for flowers! We split our flower plantings into three successions this year instead of two, and it gave us the earliest flowers we’ve ever had. The flower share started a week earlier than usual with some gorgeous snapdragons in full bloom. Our strawflower yield was also particularly abundant this year, and we were able to harvest crates worth of flowers for drying without making a dent. We had 9 weeks straight of sunflowers, ranging from white to the classic yellow to some dark fall colors – something for everyone! Next year we plan on having even later snapdragon blooms, and of course to play with some fun new varieties. We were able to give flower shareholders 367 flower stems this season, for a total value of $316.50 this year – that means you ended up getting each stem for $0.60 (and just about $100 worth of flowers more than you paid for)!
If you opted for the dahlia add-on, I hope you were as breathtaken as we were. We grew over 30 varieties this year, and they blew our minds! Tall blooms, “dinner plate” dahlias, classic colors and variegated blooms. They glorified our bouquets and yours! Our dahlia field is still in its early stages, with over double the bed feet this year than last year, so we weren’t sure what we’d be able to give this year. We were able to give a whopping 42 stems of dahlias in just 4 weeks, exceeding the value of the share by 25%. Given that these flowers range from $3-$8 a stem at other farms, our dahlia share is the cheapest way I know of to get your hands on dahlias.
Gleaners CSA
The goal of this share is to get less marketable but still delicious preservable produce into the hands of people who can put it to good use. I was glad to start off the season with a harvest of 2 quarts of strawberries (before they went down in the blink of an eye!), to be able to give people plenty of green beans and cherry tomatoes (4 quarts each!) and to be able to give people a chance to do some last minute saving of crops prior to the frost, even if it was an unconventional off-hours bonus share. I love this share because I know so many of the shareholders have saving food as a priority, and thus aren’t afraid of something a little weird or a little ugly, or some unusual instructions. I find it harder and harder to give larger amounts to glean as we grow as a business and our farmstand demand grows. However, each shareholder got 10 quarts worth of peas, green beans, cherry tomatoes, and strawberries, 11 pounds worth of tomatoes and cucumbers, and 17 basil plants worth of produce (for a total of $150 of value, valued at 50% of the usual cost!) – that’s a lot of food put to good use, especially if you consider all 30 shareholders.
Fruit CSA
We can’t take very much credit for this share, as all the fruit is grown by the good folks at Autumn Hills Orchard in Groton, MA (with the occasional supplement from other local farms – the delicious melons and cantaloupes were from Next Barn Over in Hadley!). However, I do coordinate what goes in the share, and I was excited to be able to provide people with such a wide range of New England fruit – blueberries, apricots, plums, pears, melons, and of course, so many peaches and apples. For most people, fruit is one of the hardest things to stick to eating locally – all the mangos and pineapples in stores are hard to resist, and imported grocery store fruit is often cheaper. This is no fault of the individual, and entirely goes to show how our broken food system gets in the way of accessing what’s local. What I love about this share is the ability to experience how delicious and diverse the fruit grown right here in New England is. It’s also been such a delight to work with Ed from Autumn Hills, and our partnership is an example of how community driven this farm is – many of you who have a fruit CSA also are customers at his orchard, which is awesome! We’re glad to provide people with 15 weeks of local, delicious fruit (and especially thankful we had such a strong stonefruit year this year!).
Thank you!
Thank you all for such a great season, and thank you for putting your trust in us to provide you with good produce all summer long. A CSA is an investment, and we don’t take that lightly. Your trust and support is really what makes everything that happens at this farm possible.