Natural Harvest Co-op • Virginia, MN

Our local growers Mike Olund, Janna Goerdt, and Tim and Becky Pretasky have graced us with their fresh, green goodies, and we are so excited to enjoy this first taste of local.

Mike Olund has been growing organically in Brimson for more than 30 years, and his lettuce is a favorite at the co-op.

This year, he brought us garlic scallions for the first time. What can you expect? They’re a lot like green onions, with the extra bite of garlic at the bulb. Try them on the grill!

Janna Goerdt grows in Embarrass, another notoriously cold spot, but by the looks of her lovely spring mix you’d never know.

Her radishes have a sweet and spicy snap to perk up your spring salads and snacking. And they’re so pretty, too.

And last but not least, the shortest season favorite of them all … check these beautiful asparagus from the Pretaskys in Meadowlands!

Inside the store, you can still find asparagus roots, seed potatoes, onion & shallot sets and plenty of seeds for growing. Plus, we have organic fertilizer, worm castings and a new organic potting soil, which is made without peat and more sustainable. Available in 50 lb bags, too. Spring on in!

Oh greenhouse, sweet greenhouse, how lovely you are!

When the sun is shining, this small shed is bursting with possibility; on gray days it is filled with hopeful green and those great greenhouse smells! We have seven varieties of organic slicing tomatoes, lettuces, lots of pansies, petunias, and peppers, plus every other vegetable and herb you could want to grow. 

Inside the store, we have organic fertilizer and potting soil, seed potatoes, onion sets, seeds and more! Come check us out. New deliveries to the greenhouse every Friday … going strong through the end of June!

            In October, to celebrate National Co-op Month, we encouraged you to bring your own bags, and a weekly raffle awarded those cloth baggers with a gift certificate to the store. Now, as part of a graduate school project to identify and reduce waste at work, staff member Erin Shea is addressing our issues with paper grocery bags. She’s analyzed our consumption of paper bags and already the results have surprised us. Even as a store that reuses paper bags regularly (thanks to shoppers returning all your paper bags to the store) and encourages you to bring your own, we still purchased more than 32,500 paper bags last year. At a cost of $2,000 to the store, or $.12 for each large handled bag, the bags exact an even greater cost in space at the landfill, where they all (even the lovingly reused ones) eventually land.

            Why do you use paper bags? Every household seems to have at least one reusable bag in the house, if not many more. We know how easy it is to forget the bag in the house, or in the car, and how much more convenient it can seem to just say, “Bag it,” when we’re in a rush. As part of our effort to better understand why we use paper bags, Erin also conducted a survey of customers. The goal of all this work is to identify waste in the store, to understand its causes, and to cut down on our excesses. This is a change that comes about gradually, but is a really simple way to use less paper and reduce cost and waste in the long run.

            So many of our shopping trips are quick ones that require only one bag. Storing a small bag or backpack in your car or a Chicco-style bag in your purse or at your desk might enable you to save us (and, ultimately, the landfill!) multiple paper bags every month. Stay tuned as we work to bring more of our own bags to shop, and hopefully you will, too.