The Stone Blog

As a kid, you never had to tell me twice to eat my vegetables. My Mom loves to tell the story of how I once begged her in the market to buy fresh brussels sprouts when they weren’t on sale. Another Mother immediately intervened and told her, “if your kid wants to eat brussels sprouts, you give him brussels sprouts.” From childhood through my teens I kept a garden in the back part of our yard and would come home after school to tend to it and eat fruits and veggies raw that I rinsed off with the hose. Nothing beats that taste of sweet white corn right off the stalk, the spice of a radish you just pulled or a tomato that you plucked off the vine.

Over the past year I started obsessing about the old days and really wanted to start a garden. The problem is that my wife Nancy and I live in a condo. Naturally, the Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens was the closest source I could imagine for local organic produce and I talked to GK (aka our CEO Greg Koch) about what was possible. He suggested to check out a CSA. Huh? Get thee to a wiki!

Community-supported agriculture is a socio-economic model of agriculture and food distribution. A CSA consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production. CSA’s focus is usually on a system of weekly delivery or pick-up of vegetables and fruit, sometimes dairy products and meat.

Thank you Wikipedia. With a little additional help from Google, I quickly found a really helpful site: localharvest.org. On there I found several local CSAs and found one that had a weekly pickup point near us. It went by the name of Garden of Eden Organics and the only form of validation I had was that it was well regarded on yelp. So I signed up for a 4 week trial to see how it was.

Each week Nancy and I get a box of random local, organic and in-season produce. This appeals to me because I love to cook and always welcome the surprise of having to work with something unexpected. So each week there’s something new. Since October here’s a sampling of the interesting things we’ve had enter our kitchen: kohlrabi, curly kale, purple radish, rainbow chard, purple cosmic carrots, and more that you can check out on their weekly blog where they chronicle what has been in boxes. There’s common staples each week too, like spinach, apples, oranges, avocados, etc. But these “common” items have so much flavor that you seem to experience it for the first time. I remember the first apple, so flowery, so crisp, so sweet…so AMAZING! Then there’s the fun perks they find like olives, olive oil and honey.

So any-who, why am I going on and on about this on the Stone Blog? Well, because GK & I both wanted Stone be a pickup point, and as luck would have it Garden of Eden Organics was looking for a location in Escondido! So starting July 24th you’ll be able to pick up a CSA box from the brewery on Fridays from 5-6pm. That’s right, come over after work on a Friday, fill up your growler with beer fresh off the tap and pick up your week’s worth of organic local produce in the same stop. Could you ask for a better start to your weekend?

How to sign up:

1. Go on to goeorganics.com
2. Click on the Pledge Form link
3. Check the Stone Brewing Co button
4. See you on Fridays!