Vagabond Vege CSA

What is a CSA?

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. It’s a partnership between awesome people like you, and small sustainable farms like us, that ensures prosperity for both parties. As a CSA member, your financial contribution and commitment gives us the stability and security to cover the costs of growing. In return you will receive a share of the seasonal harvest - this is why we call them CSA Shares.

A CSA is not a vege box scheme, and we are not a supermarket. We are farmers growing real food. This means some vege will not be the same size, might look different to 'normal', and sometimes even come home with a slug - but it will always be grown in the best way, to ensure its nutritional value. It also means we can't have all vegetables available each week, and rely heavily on seasonal growing practices.

A CSA member understands that we are striving to grow a diverse range of vegetables to have a diverse spread each week, but that there may be crop failures from time to time. Your financial contribution may not always equate to the value of the box - during times of abundance your share will be larger and during leaner times it will be less so.

CSA Duration

There are four CSA periods in a year. These run for 13 weeks and run from December-Febuary, March-May, June-August and September-December.

Pick-up & Delivery

We offer both delivery and pick-up options for getting your CSA share. Delivery fees are to cover packaging and courier/delivery costs.

Pick-up: Wednesdays from 3pm to 6pm, at the farm in Greytown

Wairarapa Delivery: Wednesdays. $7 for Greytown, Carterton, Martinborough, Featherston between 1pm and 6:30pm.

Wellington Delivery: $10 Delivery to Wellington from Thorndon south to Miramar/Island Bay on Wednesday's from 5pm to 12am. Address must be accesible outside business hours.
Please check the delivery map here

Lower Hutt Pickup: $5 Delivery to Forage Merchants Lower Hutt. Boxes will arrive between 1-3pm Wednesday (pick-up closing 4:30pm) and shares must be collected by 4pm Thursday. You will recieve a text when the boxes leave the farm.

Why join a CSA?

Advantages for you:

Advantages for us:

CSA Values

We chose the CSA model for our farm because of these values that align with our kaupapa:

Real Kai

In the age of the supermarket, it is hard to know where our kai comes from, who grew it and what’s actually in it. Farmers have been pushed into industrial monocropping because that is deemed the only economically viable way to grow food. We want to be part of the change towards a diverse network of small regenerative farms.

Reciprocity

The sense of having each other’s backs. We look after you by providing you and your whānau with nutritious food, grown in a way that takes care of the land. In return, as a member you look after us by buying a long term share of produce so we have the means to grow. Knowing that we are backed by our local community, helps us get through the challenges of farming (like wind and rocks!).

Resilience

The CSA model generates the support required for a small farm like us to be sustainable. It also means resilience in the sense of local self-sufficiency, meaning we are not at the whim of long overseas supply chains. For us, resilience is knowing we are backed despite events that are out of our control. If a sudden hail storm takes out part of the eggplant crop, everyone is disappointed together, and together we share the abundance of a crop that did very well that year.

Low waste

Through knowing all of our customers personally, we can better suit our weekly offerings and packaging to minimize or eliminate unnessecary waste in our weekly food.