*fields in snow above the tunnels, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, spinach, green curly kale, bok choi, tokyo bekana, green cabbage, mesclun mix, and mini head lettuce
Roots: carrots, yellow potatoes, rutabaga, red beets, chioggia beets, watermelon radish, daikon radish, and Gilfeather turnip
Alliums: garlic, shallots, and leeks
Herbs and Miscellaneous: parsley

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag to Ludlow or Rutland

Details for the Last Week of the Season

The barn will be set up with veggies Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (9am to 8pm). All delivered bags will happen on Friday this week, none on Wednesday.

Farm News

This is the last week of the fall CSA season. We have been taking a winter break for January and February, and then starting up our spring CSA the first week in March. When we have updated the website with those dates, rates, and sign ups, we will send an email out to let everyone know. Until then, THANK YOU, for your continued support for this farm. We feel incredibly lucky to have so many wonderful CSA members that keep this farm chugging along. We hope you all have a wonderful winter.

We use the next two months for an assortment of things: Every winter, there is a bunch of website updates to make and cleanup. We figure out the CSA season dates for the next year. We do a thorough past year budget analysis to create next year’s budget. We create the entire year’s seeding and transplanting schedule along with the crop maps for the 37 different fields we rotate through on these 4 acres. We sort through, consolidate, and process a year’s worth of notes and data to make adjustments and improvement plans for next year. We fill out all our applications: organic certification, Real Organic certification, food safety certification, VT Food Bank production application, exemptions from power line spraying, FSA/USDA program applications, and I am sure my brain may be forgetting some… We finish purchasing all of this year’s supplies that we didn’t squeeze in to December: seeds, cover crops, greenhouse supplies, packaging, storage, small tools, row cover, supplies for maintenance projects, etc. We file all the things: taxes, unemployment payroll records, state and federal payroll information, workers comp audits, etc. We fantasize about new, fun, unique crops to try or return to. We figure out staffing needs and potentially find additional teammates for parts of the upcoming season. We map out and coordinate our spring seedling production and sales and get that live on the website. We try to repair all the things… though we have more “time” to catch up on repairs and maintenance, it can all take a lot more time when things are frozen and cold. And before we know it, we are setting up the grow room in the root cellar to start the earliest seeds, before firing up the big prop house.

It’s easy for all these tasks to keep our work schedule at a full time level, but this winter we hope to map out some intentional time each week to just rest a little more. And some of those winter tasks will just have to wait, or be late, or done less precise, or whatever so we can squeeze in some art, music, skiing, socializing, napping, reading, whatever… just to turn off our farming and parenting brains for a little bit.

Thank you again, for another great season. Hope you enjoyed the veggies as much as we did. We put a little photo tour from the year below. See you in the spring!

Have a great winter,

-ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, Taylor, Galen, Cindy, Katie, K2, Leah, and Natalie (and Sky and Soraya)

Spinach Feta Watermelon Radish Quiche