A boxful of bounty, farm-fresh

We were waiting for Jah.

Not Jah, the deity, but Jah the farmer, a.k.a. dreadlocked farmer Matt Bruckler 3d, who was supposed to deliver our first box of organic vegetables from his farm, Jah's Creation, in Egg Harbor Township.

But it was late at night, and Jah had still not arrived. On opposite ends of our town, my friend Joan and I waited, and then once the boxes had arrived, close to midnight on that hectic first week, we wondered.

What would we do with all that kale?

And so it began, our adventures with the half-bushel box of organic vegetables that Bruckler - a fourth-generation farmer on that land on Spruce Avenue - would personally drop off to us every week, from May through October.

This was my first experience with community-supported agriculture, or CSA, where members typically pay from $500 to $800 a season, up front, or, in my case, in two installments of $360, for a 26-week share of a local farm's harvest. The farmer benefits by getting the money at the start of the season when he needs it most and a guaranteed customer base. Members benefit by getting a box of just-picked local produce each week.

I've loved it, even with the added challenge of not having a working kitchen for some of the time because mine was under construction. So far, it has been a lot of kale, a lot of greens, a lot of different choys, a lot of lettuce, plus a wild card each week that is Matt's signature: some kind of exotic vegetable or variety of choy that probably would never manage to land on your dinner plate otherwise. I had bought vegetables from Jah's Creation last summer at the Margate Farmers Market, so I knew some of the stuff in the box would be exotic.

This last week, it was the baby golden beets. I didn't even know what these were until I cut into one, and it was so young and so tender and such a pretty yellow that we just cut the beets into slices and added them directly to our red leaf lettuce salad, also from the box. It was fantastic. Another Jah specialty is sweet bunching onions (scallions); I just kept adding them to various sandwiches. And who knew there were so many choys besides bok? Hello, Baby Mei Qing Choy and your cousin Tat Choy.

I love getting the vegetables directly from the farmer, usually now around mid-afternoon on Fridays, from a farm just a few miles from my house, no middleman, no corporation, no processing other than Bruckler's washing, sorting, and boxing his crops.