Everything you might want to know before joining — and a few things worth knowing after you do. For the full terms, read our CSA Member Agreement.
CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. You buy a share of the farm's harvest up front, and in return you get a box of vegetables every week through the season. Your payment comes before the food does — that's what lets us buy seed, plastic, and compost in the winter and spring when a small farm has expenses but no income. In exchange, you get vegetables picked that morning at a price well below what comparable produce costs at a store.
We run two seasons. The Summer Season runs from April through November, with a four-week break in August when the summer crops are finishing and the fall crops are going in. The Winter Season runs November 25 through April 7 — twenty weeks straight through.
A share is $38 per week. For the Winter Season that's $725 paid in full, or $152 a month for five months. Paying in full helps the farm most, but the monthly plan exists so the cost is manageable.
Wednesdays. Everything in your box is harvested that morning or the evening before.
You choose one location when you sign up:
Send a friend, a neighbor, or a family member — anyone can collect it, they just need to know your name. If you're going to be away, log into your account and place a delivery hold before the deadline. Unclaimed boxes are donated at the end of the pickup window; we can't hold them or double up the following week, because the food doesn't keep and we've already harvested it for you.
A bag or a box. Take your vegetables out of the farm's containers and leave the containers at the site so we can reuse them. If you took a clamshell or an egg carton home, bring it back — we'll use it again.
Seven items each week. That's a good amount for two adults who cook most nights, or a family of four who eats vegetables with dinner but shops for the rest. If you cook every night and eat a lot of greens, you may want a share plus a few extras. If you eat out four nights a week, a share might be more than you'll get through.
Not currently. We're a small farm and packing dozens of individual custom boxes isn't something we can do well yet. What we can promise is variety: over a season you'll see twenty-five or more different crops, and we build each box to feel like a week of good eating rather than five pounds of one thing.
It changes every week with the season. In winter, expect kale, collards, spinach, salad turnips, storage carrots, beets, cabbage, lettuce, arugula, radishes, and cold-weather greens most people have never seen in a store — claytonia, mâche, tatsoi, Tokyo bekana. Frost makes all of it sweeter, which is the best-kept secret of winter vegetables.
That's half the point. Every box comes with a note about what's in it, how to store it, and what to do with the unfamiliar things. Ask us — we cook this food too.
No — we're what we call beyond organic. Certification is a paperwork and fee burden that makes sense for farms selling wholesale into stores, and less sense for a small farm selling directly to the people who eat the food. You can drive out here and look at the beds yourself.
What that means in practice: we don't spray unless a crop would otherwise be lost, and when we do, we use only OMRI-approved materials — the same ones certified organic growers are allowed. Most weeks we spray nothing at all. We build soil with compost, rotate crops, use insect netting instead of insecticide where we can, and accept some holes in the leaves as the cost of doing it this way.
Sometimes, yes. We wash and pack carefully, but food grown outdoors without chemical insecticide occasionally arrives with a bit of soil or the odd insect. Rinse everything before you cook it. A little dirt is a sign of what you're not getting.
A CSA share is a season commitment, not a subscription — the money you pay in the spring is already in the ground by summer. That said, if your circumstances change substantially, talk to us. We'd rather find a solution than have you feel stuck.
Tell us at hello@pungofarm.com — directly, early, and specifically. We can't fix what we don't hear about, and we'd much rather adjust something than lose a member quietly at the end of a season.
Everything's on the join page. If you have a question that isn't answered here, email us at hello@pungofarm.com and we'll answer it honestly.
This part matters, so we want to be direct about it.
When you join a CSA, you are not buying a guaranteed weekly delivery of specific vegetables. You are buying a share of what this farm produces — and sharing in both the rewards and the risks of growing food outdoors in coastal Virginia.
Most weeks, that's a good deal for you. You get more food, fresher, for less money than the equivalent would cost anywhere else. But some weeks the weather, the pests, or plain bad luck take a crop out. A hard freeze, a hurricane, a week of rain at the wrong moment, an insect year we didn't see coming — any of it can mean a box that's lighter than we wanted, or missing something we told you was coming.
We do everything we reasonably can to prevent that. We irrigate in drought, cover crops with insect netting, grow in tunnels through the winter, and plant a wide range of crops and varieties precisely so that a failure in one doesn't empty your box. Diversity is our insurance policy.
But we can't promise a specific vegetable on a specific date, and we won't pretend otherwise. What we can promise is this: whatever the farm produces, our members get first. We take the same risk you do — a bad year costs us far more than it costs you.
By signing up for a share, you're agreeing to share in the risks and the rewards of a small, local, chemical-free farm. That's what makes it community supported.
Email hello@pungofarm.com and we'll get back to you. We'd rather answer questions now than have you sign up unsure.
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