All About the Mystery Item

Check out winged beans! We love featuring this crispy bean when we can find it!

Featuring a weekly veggie surprise not only adds more variety to your plate, it also helps us support a broader base of local farmers.

In 2012, the county department of R&D released a Hawaii County Food Self-Sufficiency study giving an overview of the status of local agriculture and land use patterns. The study states that truck crop farming accounts for most of the vegetables grown on Hawai'i Island. Truck farming is a lot like market gardening - farmers grow a variety of crops for the market at a commercial, but generally fairly small scale.

Did you know that 68% of truck crops grown on Hawaii Island are produced on parcels of 20 acres or less and 48% are grown on parcels less than 10 acres in size. Small farmers on Hawaii Island contribute in big ways to our food security and culinary landscapes. Since our CSA has taken off, not all of our farmers always have over 500 orders of a certain crop ready for harvest each week.

That’s why we are introducing a mystery item, this way we can source smaller amounts of a larger variety of produce each week. That means you might get okra in your bag while your friend gets bitter-melon or celery.

We hope that the mystery item will add a fun element of surprise to your weekly produce bag while helping us support local farmers on every scale of production.

Pictured above is purslane, one of our staple mystery items. So yummy tossed in a salad and full of great nutrients.

Fun Fact: The origins of the term “truck farming”
don’t actually have anything to do with trucks at all.
The term is derived from the French word troquer,
which means “barter” or “exchange”.