They should’ve warned me about all that kale.

This summer we bought a CSA share in Allandale Farm, a gorgeous working farm right here in Brookline, MA. It’s where we go for pumpkins in October and Christmas trees in December.

The Community Supported Agriculture model lets consumers purchase shares of the coming season’s harvest. Since I love to cook with fresh food, this bounty is making the Summer of ’16 extra special. Every Wednesday I drive the 3 minutes to the farm and pick up my bushel, jam-packed with a generous amount of just-harvested herbs and vegetables, and the occasional fruit.

I love their produce, but I have a complaint: there’s not enough advance notice about what to expect. Most weeks, they send an email, but this week, we got none. I couldn’t plan my upcoming meals without knowing what we’d get (although kale is always included).

Years ago we bought our first CSA share at this farm. Back then, the bushel of food included not only a printed list of what was inside the box, but also a few recipes for those ingredients.

I miss those recipes. And while it’s pretty easy to Google “recipes with kale” or “what to do with garlic scapes,” receiving printed recipes from the farm would make the experience so much better for customers.

This summer, since I don’t want to scroll through my emails to find the one they may have sent me, I take a photo of the blackboard sign that’s by the pick-up area. (To be honest, it also helps me identify things I don’t recognize. Kohlrabi, anyone?)

Keeping your customers “in the know” with information they expect is crucial, whether you’re a farmer or a printer – or a freelance writer.

Then I realized the farm could do more to engage its CSA customers in ways that could help endorse and promote the program. What if they invited customers to do the following:

• Share recipes we make with the produce
• Upload photos of the dishes we prepare
• Upload videos of our home cooking with their produce
• Post questions for other CSA members in a member forum. (This would also be helpful if we want to swap any produce with other locals.)
• Enter some sort of photo contest, like “Best Still Life with Vegetables,” to share online, in which we get our family and friends to vote as well.

Wouldn’t these kinds of customer engagement strengthen our connection to the farm? And once we take photos or videos, you and I know that we’d be sharing them in our social channels. #AllandaleFarm!

My question for you: can this inspire you to come up with ways to better engage your own customers? What contests or other challenges might you create to get customers to showcase your products and tell other people why they love them?

I wish Allandale held a “Getting Creative with Kale” contest, because I could use more recipes, and I’m running out of ideas…but not kale.