Pumpkins, CSAs and things

It has been a while, longer than I would have suspected given the time of year, but we have continued harvesting for wholesale longer than ever before.  Also harvested for our pre-Thanksgiving Day sale to members recently.  The sale went well, and I have enjoyed doing a little more wholesaling this year.  But mostly I was thinking about pumpkins.  I made our second pumpkin pie of the year yesterday (the first one which I thought was going to be the Thanksgiving one got eaten).  Out of that same pumpkin I also made two loaves of bread (of which one is still frozen either awaiting Santa or a pot luck), so we are talking about 4 cans of pumpkin (incidentally I should mention all recipes are from Rodale's cookbook which I think has very nice basic whole foody versions of these things).  As I've said like a ba-jillion times so I won't say it too much more, fresh pumpkin rocks can pumpkins world, and isn't that much more work.  But as I was thinking it again today I had another thought which was, "Boy, it sure is more expensive though."

4 cans OG pumpkin at city market (on sale) = $11.96
10# local OG pumkin at city market = $16.90

I was actually expecting more of a difference, but still, 17 bucks on a pumpkin may not be something everyone can swallow, so one is probably prone to just get a can at a time of canned and call it a day.  But then, my next thought was, "Oh, wait, my members don't pay anything like that for the pumpkin they got (some larger than 10, some smaller, but I would guess that was quite close to the average), they paid $5."  Which of course led to the epiphany that having a CSA is really a cheap way to eat like a king.  Which given some current debate at least in our hyper-local neck of the woods makes me think there is still an important place for them, or many important places.

I will do an end of year sum-up, but probably closer to the end of the year.  Everyone enjoy T-day!