11th Week of the Spring CSA season: Week of May 15th

May 11

*last baby lettuce to harvest in the tunnel this spring, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have garlic, yellow potatoes, daikon radishes, fresh red radishes with greens, bok choi, spinach, baby lettuce, scallions, rhubarb, and some early plant starts for your garden*.

*If you order a bag for delivery, take note that the basil, parsley, thyme, sage, rosemary, and parsley are all labeled as “plants” and are for planting. (These are not cut bunches of fresh herbs.) Also, if you select a basil plant, keep it indoors until the threat of frost has passed at the end of the month. The other plants are cold hardy and can be planted whenever you want.

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

*the tunnel with most of the remaining greens to harvest during the spring season, photo by Adam Ford*

looking down on cucumber seedlings packed together with large cotyledon leaves and their first true leaf — *cukes in the prop house, photo by Adam Ford*

*zukes before transplanting, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

Well the extended substantial snow season this April was super fun to sneak in some extra time downhill skiing with our kiddos, but it’s has been a challenge for our greens availability in early May. Next week we look forward to being able to harvest from our first outdoor plantings; in the meantime we are a bit in-between the last of the tunnel greens and the first of the outdoor crops. Ryan snuck a substantial outdoor seeding on March 10th, but the warm and dry spell of early March gave way to several March and April snowstorms that delayed the maturation of those crops. For this week we are supplementing the greens we are harvesting here with some additional greens from Winter Street Farm in Claremont. They are also certified organic, and a no-till operation.

Besides the challenge of being uncharacteristically low on greens, things are otherwise going well around here. The team slammed out a lot of transplanting this week, and also got many of those same beds finished and tucked in for their spring season: We mulched beds of peas, cabbage, kale, chard, and parsley, and row covered an early transplanting of zucchini. We are transitioning a lot of growing spaces to more no-till practices and it’s fun to see various mulch methods going in place. We’ll share more of these interesting growing practices in future newsletters.

One of the preparations that was done was forking a lot of dandelions from the growing spaces. Dandelions are one of our biggest outdoor weeds in the growing fields, and we like to remove as much of their tap root as possible before they set their gorgeous puffy seeds to be carried around the gardens. (The other half of this trick is to mow the grass around the field before they set seed!)

If you pick up your veggies at the farm, you are almost guaranteed to be greeted by one of our goats, Noel. She is new to us as of last November, and she thinks it’s hilarious that the rest of our goats are contained by a 4-foot electric fence, now that we moved them out onto green grass for the season. At the moment, she possesses the miraculous skill of not munching on things that we don’t want her to, but we don’t imagine that skill will last once the veggie fields are bursting with treats not covered by row cover. While this is an undesirable trait, she is also the most fantastic milker I have owned. So until I figure out how to contain her in our mobile electric fencing setup during the pasturing season, you will almost definitely meet her at some point. If you see her, feel free to pet her, she’s sweet, and don’t worry, we know she is out…

Have a great week!

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

Rhubarb Crisp