San Francisco’s Premium, Local Organic CSA Box

Small family farm organic fruits, vegetables, pasture raised meats and eggs- delivered to your door!

The Greenhearts Family Farm CSA box arrives each week with a story. Sometimes it’s about what’s happening on the farm, sometimes it’s a story about our adventures in farming. This following story is set on a beautiful organic farm in the northern part of New Zealand…

Becky was an Irish wanderer, Marty a New Zealander of the finest English stock. He had bought plenty of good mixed use land, developed its agriculture and timber, divorced his first wife, a strong raw boned blonde woman with ruddy cheeks who’d borne him 2 healthy children, and married Becky 20 years his junior and a fine bread baker. Her loaves were rich and whole and perfect every time. At least they were to us. We were quite hungry.

Aurora and I were sleeping in Marty’s shanty past the creek with the other farm workers and the local roustabout, Stephen, who was a perennial visitor, the guest who never left. We were WWOOFING in New Zealand. Willing Workers On Organic Farms. We traded four hours of work for a night’s lodging and food. We stayed with Marty and Becky and their love child Rosy, barefoot explorer at 2 years of age. And we shared the soggy, wood stove heated, spidery, stale shack with Stephen and Sutoshi as well, likewise barefoot, now that I remember it. A barefoot, simple food eating space travelling WWOOFER from Japan who was lovely and idealistic and full of shit and quite sincere. He wasn’t always barefoot. He had a pair of clear jelly women’s flip flops with a plastic flower atop the toes he wore when driving the tractor or using a shovel. His feet were extremely, amusingly dirty but not filthy. He had no problem shoveling the human compost from the outhouse and building a better latrine. Barefoot crap shoveling hard working Sutoshi. He was a miracle of self abuse.

I built a new façade for Marty’s farm store. I’d mentioned I was a carpenter and he gave me a cheap-o rusted hammer and some tacks and a few odd nails and a bloody dangerous electric circular saw and permission to build. He gave us one of the greatest experiences of our lives, I’m sure. We picked orchards and fields for him and ran his little dry goods and produce store and cleaned up his shack; demonstrated the puritan American work ethic and earned our keep and didn’t think once to pass judgment on his life choices but reaped his knowledge and drank in his joy and we wanted to be farmers too to be as happy as he. Aurora was hooked, she was, on pastoral bliss. She practiced baking loaves and peeled a thousand bushels of persimmons for the dehydrator. And then one day we left. We bought Marty’s ex-wife’s Nissan Bluebird and drove it to the end of the earth and then turned around and came right home again to get started and here we are today picking a dark field on a cold and windy evening, the sun already down. Whatever possessed us, I wonder?