11th Week of the Spring CSA season: Week of May 10th

May 6

*next round of tunnel tomatoes on the left, pre-ordered plants on the right, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have red radish bunches, spinach, green curly kale, scallions, flowering kale “raab,” baby chard, parsley, red beets, chioggia beets, carrots, onions, daikon radishes, watermelon radish, kohlrabi, yellow potatoes, and the first few plants for your garden: oregano, thyme, and sage. (More will start getting ready over the next few weeks.)

Read the “farm news” section below to learn about where the salad greens are this week.

Flowering kale “raab” is a delicious, fun, spring treat. We harvest the tender shoots, flowers, and leaves of the kale plants right before they go to flower as they put energy into setting seed. We cook with them like broccoli raab. A simple way to enjoy them as a side dish is sautéed with butter, garlic, a bit of lemon juice and salt… so good!

*carrots, onions, and beets are sourced from Juniper Hill Farm, also certified organic

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag

Ordering closes at noon on Tuesdays for Wednesday bags, and at midnight on Wednesdays for Friday bags.

You do not need to fill out the form if you plan to come to the barn on Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Farm News

It’s possible after looking at the availability list for this week, you may think: It’s hard for me to miss a week of baby lettuce or mesclun mix! I share that sentiment, you are in good company. This week we aren’t able to harvest baby lettuce or mesclun mix because it just isn’t big enough yet to have enough to cut for the week. We are in between plantings, and a variety of factors have made this situation arise this week: the lingering snow melt into early April this year, the cooler, wet weather recently, and the fact that we use the high tunnel spaces for spring and summer crops.

Running the spring CSA season is actually one of the harder seasons: we try hard to have a “salad mix” available each week, but as we keep harvesting things out the tunnel we need to immediately replace those harvested out crops with summer transplants to have early tomatoes and cucumbers. We rely on our earliest outdoor seedings to help us through this late April/early May tight spot for salad greens, but this year, we weren’t able to start seeding outdoors until almost two weeks later than we usually have been in recent years, as we waited for the last snow dump to melt from the fields. And the last week just hasn’t been that sunny to really help these “almost ready” greens get a growing boost. The perfectionists in us don’t enjoy that sometimes this break in salad greens happens, but then I am reminded that this is why we run a CSA program: to reflect to the community what seasonal crops can grow well at different parts of the year, and to get a window into the dance of balancing crop demands. For instance, we wouldn’t have a salad greens shortage this week if we didn’t also grow tomatoes for the early summer. And some farms do that: Some farms just focus on salad greens and some farms just focus on tomatoes. We grow over 80 varieties of veggies, and they are always competing for space! So this week I am going to enjoy cooked greens, raw rubbed kale salads, spinach salads, and hope for some sunshine to help the other greens get over the finish line.

Last week was another big seeding week, and potentially the last big, big seeding week for the spring season. We will continue to seed things weekly, but that was likely the biggest hump, and it feels fun to have that accomplished. The team spread wood chip mulch on all the paths for the pick your own flower garden. They also added a mulch layer to our young, eager blueberry bushes. We continued to do some transplanting when the rain finally stopped at the end of the week, starting with some early brassicas and then getting to dive into starting the onion transplanting. The team moved tarps around to new fields, removed old brassica stems from last year to prep for transplanting and moved rocks out of growing spaces. Katie kept doing rounds of direct seeding for the fast growing greens outside. Bryan and Cindy made big headway in building a new ramp into the barn. (The original one was rotting, needed some new boards, and a more accessible railing. As they took it apart they also found water issues at the entry way, so they needed to wrap flashing all the way around the floor of the sliding door to prevent that from continuing to happen.) They will add an overhang over the ramp to extend the life of this new ramp. They also finished the wiring in the new building, which is a real treat to have light in that work space now.

And finally, on a totally different note this week: Ryan read an article in the NOFA-VT newsletter about microplastics in commercial composting that was completely new information to both of us, and has kind of made my head explode. (He read the paper copy from the newsletter, and the one I linked above from VT Digger is slightly different, with less info on how this got approved at the state level. The article also links to an organization that provides more information on this topic.) The cliff notes of this story is that the composted produce that leaves large grocery stores do not have to be removed from their plastic packaging before being shredded up with the ingredients for compost. This shredded up plastic/food waste mess eventually makes it back onto agricultural fields. (Quick side note: NOT on certified organic farm fields, but even I, who is pretty diligent about only purchasing certified organic food for our family, still eat non-organic food items from time to time. And considering most humans don’t get to eat organic food, this is a big downer.) Crushing plastic up with food waste is not compost. It’s trash. It’s trash that has food waste mixed into it. And I am surprised that this was greenlit in Vermont. Sometimes I am impressed that with all the knowledge and science we have in 2023, we continue to make weird policy decisions that threaten the health of ourselves and our only home. So if this is also as surprising to you, consider contacting your legislator so we can start getting this policy updated.

Have a great week,

ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, Galen, Taylor, Cindy, Katie, K2, Vanessa, Bryan (and Sky and Soraya)