Customers who do not have a full-summer Crooked Farmz CSA subscription may still find our compost teas and amendments available for purchase at select farmer’s markets.

We accept cash, gift, or Interac e-payment for market purchases.

Please contact each market directly during the season for current COVID-19 protocols.

$10 or Gift

Crooked Farmz is just beginning its fourth season now, and every once in a while someone asks: “What does ‘$10 or gift’ mean?”

I’m surprised at how rarely it occurs, to be honest.

“Gift means that I can gift to you, or you can gift to me, or we can both gift to each other.”

Some people are kind of intrigued by this proposition, while (many) others seem quite nervous about it, quickly hand me a tenner, and say good-day.

The gifts have taken many forms over the first three years. Sometimes I try to offer a jar to someone, and they say no, I couldn’t possibly, and then they give me $5 and feel good about the transaction. Sometimes I tell someone that the gift is not for them, but for the plants themselves. I used to have a basket of random trinkets wrapped in scraps of fabric (the fabric itself a dear gift from my mother-in-law) that people could choose from to stick in their bags and “find again” later.

And indeed, every once in a while someone has brought me a gift, too (farmer’s market vendors are especially good at this sort of sharing).

The first phrase you learn in an MBA program is “profit maximization”, and if there’s anything most crooked about Crooked Farmz, it’s the approach taken to this phrase: work within a business context, don’t maximize profit, but maximize benefits for everyone, including ecologies and more-than-human relations.

Gifting isn’t the only “economic” element to this crooked approach, but it’s an important one.