Summer Lettuce Project at JGTF
New Roots Spring Updates
Here at New Roots, we are gearing up for our first sales season led entirely by Cultivate KC. While some things have changed, you’ll notice most of our sales processes are the same as last year. We’ve worked hard to keep things as consistent as possible for farmers and customers. Keep reading to get all the details on what’s different and what’s familiar with our CSA options, Sales Team, and how you can help. We hope you’re as excited as we are for the 2026 growing season!
Purchase a CSA Share!
CSA Signups went live on March 23rd, and we are so grateful to everyone who has already purchased a farm share! We started with four pickup options, but due to our loyal customers’ requests, we added a fifth CSA pickup option. We will have another evening option on Thursdays from 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM at Juniper Gardens Training Farm. We highly recommend picking up at the farm – maybe we’re biased, but we think it’s a beautiful, energizing place!
Check out all the details on our website by CLICKING HERE. The first pickup date is May 13th, so if you haven’t signed up, time is running out!
If you are interested in donating a CSA share to support getting fresh vegetables to pantries, please visit THIS DONATION PAGE. Your gift will support New Roots farmers and bring healthy food to families who need it most.
Sales Updates & Ways to Help
The New Roots CSA is a big operation, and staffing has changed significantly since last year. Elizabeth Graham is our new Sales and CSA Program Manager. You may remember her as the Education and Outreach Coordinator for New Roots when she worked with our previous partner, Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas. Elizabeth will be the sole staff working for the CSA – a big change from last year’s four sales staff. However, we’re thrilled to share that this year we will be training and working with New Roots farmers to provide CSA support! The Farmer Sales Team will work alongside Elizabeth and volunteers to help source vegetables, organize, sort, pack, deliver and distribute. We can’t wait to start the pilot year for this new program. Training begins soon!
New Roots staff and farmers have also been working diligently on getting the eight farmers-in-training as vendors at Kansas City area farmers markets. We’ll have two farmers this year who have never been to a market, and we are dedicated to supporting them with supplies like tents, tables, crates, baskets, and more, along with the communication support needed on market days. If you’d like to help these two farmers with an in-kind donation, we are looking for large and medium sized wicker or woven baskets for their market displays. If you have any baskets you’d like to donate or purchase for us, please email newroots@cultivatekc.org. See the photo below for examples of what we’re looking for and how farmers put them to use.
You can also help by volunteering this year for farmers markets and the CSA. Farmers market volunteers meet the New Roots farmer at the farm, help them load, drive to the market, set up, and communicate with customers. While it sounds like a lot, the folks who volunteer at markets truly seem to love it, and we can testify that it is one of our favorite ways to support farmers, get to know them, and get to know the local food community.
For the CSA, we are in the process of scheduling our Farmer Sales Team for all the many hours of work it takes to run a CSA. Once we complete their schedule, we will know more about our needs. However, we are expecting we’ll need support delivering and distributing at our CSA pickup locations as well as packing and sorting produce.
Be on the lookout for an email about how to get signed up for a volunteer shift. We will be sending out more information very soon!
We’ve said it before, and we can’t say it enough: Thank you for following along on this journey over the past year! A year ago, we truly didn’t know what the New Roots Sales Program would look like this season, but as you can see, we are making it through, and that is thanks to the amazing farmers, staff, and you—our supporters. We mean it when we say we couldn’t have done it without you!
