Siena Farms Offers a ‘Kids Share’
Siena Farms photos provided for bostonmagazine.com
Every parent knows that sometimes it’s difficult (well, more like downright impossible) to get kids to eat their veggies. That’s why Siena Farms, a 70-acre market farm located in the Sudbury River Valley, has created a “Kids’ Share.”
Designed for children ages 6 to 12 in partnership with ChopChop Kids, the Siena Farms Kids’ Share’s goal is to get kids in the kitchen and cooking through their own CSA. Each week, participants will pick up a themed and recipe-focused box filled with vegetables grown using only sustainable, organic-farming methods. Siena Farms is the same farm that provides produce to some of our area’s top restaurants, such as Cambridge’s Oleana.
Each box contains: a quarter-bushel (about a half-dozen) of different veggies; two or three kid-doable recipes; games, puzzles, and activities; a half-year’s subscription to ChopChop Magazine; and a copy of the ChopChop cookbook. Reps for Siena Farms say that they’ll be harvesting for each week’s Kids’ Share according to the recipes being planned, rather than choosing recipes according to the harvest.
“Getting kids cooking is one of the best-possible, all-around, real-world learning labs. Cooking builds confidence and creativity, uses and develops reading, processing, logic, math, and art skills,” says Chris Kurth, owner of Siena Farms. “Kids learn the timeless pleasure of making food for and sharing it with others.”
Ana Sortun, the award-winning chef and partner at the Oleana Restaurant Group (and Kurth’s wife) is mom to 8-year-old Siena (the farm’s namesake), so she knows how difficult it can be to get kids interested in cooking for themselves. “Kids will love having their very own vegetables from our farm,” she says. “I hope we can inspire some early chopping, peeling, sprigging, washing—and even some cooking—with fun recipes and surprises each week.”
$250 for 12 weeks (the week of September 1 through the week of November 17); Members choose one of the farm’s many pickup locations/days in the Greater Boston area; sienafarms.com
