Sustainable Settings

Sustainable Settings is taking reservations for 2021 starting February 5 , 2021

How to get started: Call or email Rose,  [email protected] or (970)963-6107
Down load our:  CSA contract here
Come visit us at the ranch and meet the farmers that will be growing your food!

What is a CSA?

A CSA is a membership farm. Members pre-pay for their vegetable shares at the beginning of the summer, and come to the farm once a week to pick up their box of our beyond organic fresh produce. CSA is the practice of focusing on the local production and distribution of high quality foods using ecological, organic and biodynamic farming methods. This kind of farming operates with a much greater-than-usual degree of involvement of consumers resulting in a strong consumer-producer relationship.  By being a CSA member you help to fund a whole season’s budget in the spring.

You get high quality safe locally produced foods throughout the growing season. Members invest in the farm and farmer and take the risk with the farmer of bad weather, drought or crop failure. More often it is that they enjoy the bounty, full flavor and freshness that can only come from locally produced food. CSA members help keep the farmer in business and help make local food security a reality. Thus, individuals, families or groups do not pay for x pounds of produce, but rather support the budget of the whole farm and receive weekly shares of what is seasonally ripe.

This approach eliminates many marketing restraints and allows producers to focus on quality care of soils, crops, animals, co-workers—and on serving up the best possible food to nourish our families. CSA’s are a sound proposition for both producers and customers. They act as a keystone in our local food system and are a powerful vote for the preservation of our community’s agricultural open space and the beauty that we cherish here.

Your purchase and our production of locally grown food is one of THE most powerful ways to lower your carbon footprint, our community’s environmental impacts, and our country’s dependence on increasingly scarce fossil fuels. It is also the surest way to get the most nutritious food for our families. Sustainable Settings’ Market Garden and CSA are demonstrations of what we can do here in the Roaring Fork Valley to begin to provide the food we need within a 50 mile radius, instead of the 1,200 mile Caesar salad that typically graces our home tables.

Our market garden is a diverse whole system. Working from the understanding of natural systems, that one organism’s waste is another’s food, we set up the arena for the best decomposers, worms, microbes and fungi, to devour and turn our biomass, leaves from town, and live stock manures into premium compost. It is important, these days, to know where your food comes from and also where all ingredients come from in the production of our food. The rich compost we make then is applied to our garden beds and fields to revitalize our soils. It returns the important nutrients and minerals that our crops need to produce the healthiest food possible for you. Understanding and utilizing this nutrient cycle in our food production is vital to the health of our living soils and the health of our families.

All things being connected, and nothing being wasted, once we have eaten our share of the vegetables we then feed our poultry vegetable trimmings from our kitchens, weeds and harvest scraps from the garden, and let them range in the daylight everyday.This makes healthy orange yokes and increases our eggs’ Omega 3 and beneficial carotene content. Another cycle we steward involves the perennial trees and shrubs in the garden system. These trees and shrubs have been selected for their individual characteristics to build a model of regenerative sustainable agriculture. For instance the fruit bearing trees, such as the Nanking Cherry Trees and the Native Plum Trees are drought tolerant and provide us with fruit. These fruit trees are planted within proximity to the Siberian Pea Shrub, a legume that fixes nitrogen out of the air and deposits the nitrogen into its root zone in nodules making it available to the fruit trees. By setting up these diverse relationships we are modeling or taking cues from our surrounding natural ecosystem. In harvesting nature’s intelligence and applying its principles we begin to establish a foundation of self-regulating food forests and prairies that can feed people for future generations.