Everything you need to know to get started

– By the Veggie Fairy Team

Seasonal Roots is Virginia’s biggest online farmers market, and now we’ve joined forces with the oldest one, Dominion Harvest. Together, we’re supporting more local farmers and food artisans and spreading the veggie love to more local families – the more, the merrier… and the better for our planet! So for all our new Dominion Harvest members, here’s a step-by-step introduction to your growing fresh local food community:

When to place your order

From now on, you can place your order all weekend long. Your online farmers market is open from Friday at 2pm until Sunday at 11:59pm. We’ll send you an email on Friday to remind you that the market is open. During that time you can browse and shop all you want. When the market’s not open, you can take an offline tour of the ordering process by clicking here.

How to order your basket

When you sign in while the market is open, you’ll see that each order is fully customizable AND the ordering process is a little simpler — the best of all possible worlds.

It starts with a basket of fresh local produce that you can swap items in and out of. Then in the Extras section you can choose to buy dairy, bakery items, meats, artisan goods, or more produce.

First, the basket. There are three basket sizes to choose from:

To make it easy for you, we’ve pre-selected one of those produce baskets as your new default because it’s the closest match to the box you had in the Dominion Harvest system. But you’re free to change your default produce basket! Whichever basket you choose, it will come pre-filled with a selection of produce. You’re free to change that, too — just swap out items to get exactly what you want.

If you were used to getting extras like eggs, cheese, and bread with your order, keep reading!

How to order Extras

If you were used to getting extras like eggs, cheese, and bread with your order, here’s how you can easily add a pre-set assortment like that to your order:

• Step 1: Once you’re happy with your produce basket, scroll down to the Extras section.
• Step 2: Look for the “Mini-Bundles” tab and click on it.
• Step 3: There you’ll find mini-bundles of those extra non-produce items. Select the one you want.

You’re also welcome to shop a la carte in the rest of the Extras section. In fact, you can change your order as often as you like until the market closes on Sunday at 11:59pm. If you do make changes, only your most recent save will be processed, so you can disregard the email confirmations you’ll receive for the earlier saves.

The money stuff

You’ll notice that, overall, prices will not be higher. In fact, for some items you may see lower prices. The main difference is that your box of local food will be priced and organized a little differently.

By the way, Seasonal Roots has a small annual membership fee, and that membership fee will be waived for 2 years for all Dominion Harvest members.

Your credit card will be charged on Monday morning.

Delivery

If you live in Northern Virginia, Wednesday will be your delivery day. If you live anywhere from Richmond to Virginia Beach, Thursday will be your delivery day. If you’re unsure about your delivery day, drop us an email.

On your delivery day, your box of local food will be delivered to your doorstep — hand-delivered by a neighborhood Market Manager who lives near you. She or he will send you an email reminder the night before that will give you a delivery window of just a couple hours so you’ll know more exactly when to expect it. Your Market Manager is there to help, so feel free to send an email if you ever have any questions or concerns.

On delivery day, you’ll also receive a “Field Notes” email from Sam, your Farmer Connector – he’ll update you on the harvest. Sometimes Mother Nature has plans for our crops that we can’t foresee. If something foils the harvest of a basket item, we’ll substitute the closest item we can find – for example, yellow squash instead of zucchini. If it’s an Extra item that you ordered, we’ll credit it to your account.

By the way, we check and double check each item before it reaches you, but if something falls through the cracks, like a bruised apple or a missing item, we want to know! It’s easy to report an issue — visit our FAQs and scroll down to “Quality Control” for instructions.

With your first order, you’ll receive a free cooler bag to hold your cold items. Each week after that, you’ll leave out the cooler bag or a larger cooler of your own, along with an ice pack if you have one. We won’t be leaving any of those frozen bottles, so you don’t have to deal with them any more.

Next to your cooler, please leave out your empty Seasonal Roots delivery box from the week before to help us reduce our carbon footprint. Your Market Manager will whisk it away so we can reuse it again next week, saving energy and trees!

Last but not least: Enjoy!

Once you receive your order, all you have to do is enjoy it! If you ever find yourself with more fresh local produce than you can eat right away, here’s how you can preserve the nutrients and flavor until you’re ready to use it.

To get to know us better, please visit our Web site where we’ve got FAQs, the story of how we got started, and more. We also hope you’ll join us on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter!