Frequently Asked Questions

We’re planning a menu of fruits and vegetables that freeze well and are grown on local farms.There is a target list of produce, but it subject to availability due to the vagaries of weather and harvest.The target menu includes local berries: strawberries, blueberries and red raspberries, and local vegetables: English peas, sweet corn, green beans, spinach, mixed greens and broccoli.Hopefully, there will be some tasty surprises in the share too.

We will try to get as much certified organic and natural, earth-friendly grown produce as we can. So far we have a couple of certified organic farmers growing for us. (See the Meet the Growers page.) Unfortunately, we will not be able to get everything organic this year, but our philosophy is that knowing your farmer is more important than knowing your inspector. If you have a favorite local organic farmer, let us know; we are always looking to expand our organic. ..especially fruit!

 Our goal is to provide a total of approximately 28 packages of frozen food, in 4 deliveries of 7 packages per delivery.

 Blueberries and raspberries will be in 10 oz packages. Strawberries, greens and spinach will be in 12 oz packages, and everything else is anticipated to be in 16 oz packages. 

We’re still working on that plan. Home base is Ann Arbor. Where the pick location(s) end up will depend on where you live and how many other members live nearby. Get your friends and neighbors to subscribe, and we can have a pick-up location in your neighborhood!

Once per month for 4 winter/cold months, for example, the first Saturday or Sunday of the months of either Nov-Dec-Jan-Feb or Dec-Jan-Feb-March. We will also try to work with groups or geographically clustered folks to make delivery/pick-up as easy as possible.

The Michigan winter is plenty long! Enjoy what is seasonal and fresh for as long as possible into the fall, and then when the farmers market tables get quiet, enjoy your locally grown, locally preserved, frozen fruits and vegetables. We do not want to compete for space on your table with any locally grown fresh produce.

Our storage freezer is held at -15  degrees F, colder and more stable than home freezers, even chest freezers, so we can maintain a high level of quality. We do not recommend taking all of your produce at once if you have a self-defrosting and/or front door type freezer. Home freezers do not really do a good job of keeping things frozen and they subject food to freeze-thaw cycles due to self-defrosting, power outages, sloppy teenagers leaving the door open, etc, so the produce could degrade much faster at home than if we keep most of it in the storage freezer. (But if you are anxious to fill that big old chest freezer in the basement, we can work something out. )

 Because we are buying locally grown, we start with high quality, ripe, fruits and vegetables, and we can get those fruits and vegetables from farm to freezer very rapidly. We also freeze small batches of produce in order to achieve a fast freeze; we use high quality packaging material, and finally we will store the produce at -15 degrees F.

The colder you keep frozen produce, the longer it retains its nutritional value because you prevent water loss, and hence loss of water soluble vitamins, minerals & nutrients. Held below zero, you can keep produce 12 months and not tell the difference. The real problem with "quality" is a loss of texture or structure, and this loss occurs primarily due to freeze-thaw cycles that frozen food goes through inadvertently during handling and storage. A big culprit is self-defrosting freezers which cycle the temperature daily in order to melt off the frost. Self-defrosting freezers turn commercial frozen vegetables (which may have already experienced mishandling during their long journey from farm to distribution center to industrial freezer to bagger to freezer warehouse to truck to grocery store) into mushier versions of their fresh cousins.

 In certain circumstances frozen produce can be equal to fresh. Very freshly picked fruits and vegetables are the most nutritious. Since most nutrients are water soluble, the more water that has been driven off of the produce, the more it has decreased in nutritional value. (Canned fruits & vegetables therefore contain reduced amounts of nutrients than fresh & frozen produce because in order to achieve shelf stability they have been heated extensively, driving off water.) The deal with fresh and frozen is not quite so clear because produce starts losing water as soon as it is picked. Therefore if you have something sitting in the refrigerator for 3 weeks (or on refrigerated trucks) before it is consumed, in some cases it has lost a significant percentage of some vitamins (e.g. vitamin C). The same thing happens with frozen vegetables, although more slowly, more water out then less nutritional value; so "freezer-burned" veggies have lost a lot of their water & nutrients. Frozen fruits and veggies *can* be almost equal to fresh with proper handling, things like freezing right away in moisture barrier proof packaging, and consuming within several months.

 Is it really energy efficient to store all that produce for so many months? Isn't there a trade-off between energy for long-distance transportation and electrical energy for local refrigeration?

  It is surprisingly much more energy efficient to store locally vs. shipping. Using the Climate Trust.org's carbon footprint calculator, I compared trucking in 2000 lbs of fresh broccoli from California (2500 miles) with holding 2000 lbs of MI broccoli in MI in a freezer for an entire year -- trucking in fresh was NINE TIMES the carbon footprint (CO2 emissions) of running a freezer. And this is not even considering that the fresh broccoli must be in refrigerated trucks and warehouses.

 Why not just make the frozen produce available in a grocery store?

  Not yet, but I’m working on it!