Please finish paying for the spring CSA season now. This is the second to last week of the spring season, and we need to have all payments completed before a season ends. Thanks!

*Vanessa and K2 harvesting, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have red radish bunches, green curly kale, baby lettuce, baby bok choi, spinach, mescun mix, pea shoots, rhubarb, scallions, green garlic, baby kale, red beets, chioggia beets, carrots, onions, daikon radishes, watermelon radish, yellow potatoes, and if you pickup at the barn, we will have various veggie, flower, herb, and melon seedlings out to select as items.

(We did not yet take an inventory of all the seedlings, so we aren’t able to list them on the store for delivered bags since we don’t know the amounts of each plant we have. If you normally get a delivered bag, but would like the opportunity to select some plants as items, this is a good week to visit the farm to pick out your items. The address is 48 Nice Road, Cuttingsville VT, and it’s less than a mile off Route 103. We plan to get an inventory taken at the end of this week in hopes to list some plant starts on the platform to be able to order as items next week, but it would just be a handful of plants, versus the entire variety we have available here.)

Green garlic are like garlic flavored scallions. Use the entire plants: the green and white parts.

*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

Summer CSA Sign Up

Now is a good time to sign up for the Summer CSA season if you haven’t already. If you pick up at the barn, and the online tool is cumbersome, just email me the size share you want to do for the summer, and I can add you.

(And if you pay in installments with checks, feel free to send all the checks at once for the season, dated for when you want them deposited. Also, consider paying with cash, check, e-check, or even Venmo…. Credit card fees are a surprisingly large amount of our annual expenses. We continue to provide that option because we know it’s necessary for some folks, but if you don’t need to pay that way, it helps a small business out to minimize the thousands of dollars paid each year for credit card fees. And don’t feel bad if you do choose to pay that way. Thanks!)

Farm News

Wowee, it got COLD on Wednesday night! (We recorded 25, which was a welcomed temperature above the predicted 20 degrees that we saw on our weather report at bed time.) We were preparing for it, and everything did well, but leading up to it was a lot of head scratching about how much row cover to get on each crop that has already been transplanted. Everything that has been transplanted is certainly cold hardy to patchy frosts, but low 20s are another beast of cold, and would really set tender little seedlings back, even super hardy things like kales and broccoli. It jumped out to us how particularly low Wednesday nights temps were because for the week leading up to it, the statewide vegetable grower’s email list serve was abuzz with best tips and strategies for managing this low of a temperature, and what to expect for damage levels for different crops. We tucked our strawberries in super tight, gave some crops an extra cover with our ground tarps, and put irrigation on some items that we didn’t have enough row cover for. The areas that we put sprinklers on looked magical in the morning… there was an ice wonderland on the fruit trees outside our house!

After Wednesday’s low passed, we were able to plant kale, leeks, and zucchini outside. (The zucchini is frost sensative, but this time of year we take the risk of transplanting it out, and row covering it for any cold nights…. crossing our fingers for no more of these SUPER cold nights.) We also transplanted the first round of peppers and the second round of tomatoes in the tunnels.

It’s been a low and cool start to spring, so it’s nice to pop into one of the tunnels and walk among the first tomato and cucumber plants to anticipate hot summer days of eating ripe fruit and swimming after work, because these cool gray days make that seem like a lifetime away from here.

Have a great week,

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