The Towne's Harvest Garden is a five-acre diversified vegetable and educational research farm supporting a student-run, community-supported agriculture program. Towne's Harvest Garden promotes learning about food production, the value of eating and supporting local foods, community building, and individual empowerment. The Garden is named after the Towne family, one of the original homesteaders in the beautiful Gallatin Valley.

Welcome to the 2024 CSA season!

For 2024, we are offering an 18 week Program from June 12th to October 16th, with no CSA pickup on July 3rd, for a total of 18 weeks of Veggies.

What you need to know about CSA

We provide diversity, abundance, value, and a connection to the seasons.  As a CSA shareholder, you’ll get vegetables that aren’t available in grocery stores- premium Japanese salad turnips, red kohlrabi, and exotic herbs. From arugula to zucchini, we grow it all. This can be challenging,  or fun, depending on how you look at it.  As a CSA shareholder you’ll get a lot of vegetables. You might be challenged to eat more vegetables, or maybe you’ll give some away to friends or neighbors. We aim to provide a solid value in comparison to purchasing comparable organic vegetables from area stores.  We'll start the season with a focus on baby greens, transitioning to full size greens and heartier root vegetables like carrots and beets by mid July.

We do use some plastic- plastic mulch, floating row cover, high tunnels, and greenhouses. Other than our seed starting greenhouse, we do not use added heat for crop production.  This means you won’t see tomatoes in your share until late July or early August.  You’ll get winter squash in time to enjoy them through the winter, as nature intended, and they will be very good. 

We don’t have to take out an operating loan. We spend thousands of dollars on seed and supplies in January, and we’ll have paid thousands more in wages to our student employees before the first CSA pickup.  We are a student operated business with experiential education as a major focus and your pre-purchase of a season’s worth of vegetables makes this possible. 

You share in the risk. A late spring frost, a June hailstorm, a bad seed lot, a cool year, a hot year- many factors affect the production of crops, and all crops are affected differently by the various possible challenges. In our 15 years we have never failed to deliver a solid value of diverse vegetables. There have been years with more kale than peppers, and in some years, there are more green beans than in other years.  Our garlic is pretty reliable, and very good. We seed carrots every couple of weeks from April through June. While one of those plantings may well fail, it is very unlikely they all will. Our diversity in crops, crop timing, and use of coverings (high tunnels) buys us quite a bit of resilience to weather. When you purchase a CSA subscription you agree to share in the risk and the rewards of this diversity. 

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