*army of sungold cherry tomato plants heading out to people’s gardens! photo by Adam Ford*

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have red beets, orange carrots (Juniper Hill), rainbow carrots (Juniper Hill), red and yellow onions (Juniper Hill), red potatoes (Atlas Farm), flowering kale shoots*, mesclun mix, arugula, green curly kale, baby lettuce, pea shoots, claytonia, and frozen heirloom/beefsteak tomatoes.

*Flowering kale shoots shout out: We tossed them in a little olive oil and salt and put them on the grill briefly until the tips started to get crunchy, and they were fantastic. It was kind of like kale chips at the top, and tender, sweet broccolini at the bottom. 10/10 recommend :)

We will also start having a few herb plants available as CSA items: lavender, rosemary, thyme, oregano, and sage. (More plants will become available as the season goes on.)

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag

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

Farm News

This week the team transplanted a ton of plants outdoors: broccolini, red and yellow beets, cilantro, fennel, head lettuce, and more. They seeded hundreds of feet of peas and beans, and direct seeded many baby greens (mesclun, lettuces, arugula, spinach, etc), radishes, salad turnips, bok choi and more for our routine succession plantings. (Ryan and Katie plant hundreds of feet of those things about every 10 days this time of year to make sure we have a continuous harvest of those items.) Transplants got watered in ahead of this week’s projected BEAUTIFUL, sunny weather and then tucked in with row cover to help things along in the cool spring soil. We continue to prep other fields for more plantings, and continue to transition winter crops out of the tunnels for more summer crops that go in this time of year. This week we plan to put in the next round of tomatoes in the Chocolate Factory after removing many, many beds of winter spinach. And we will also start transplanting all the onions, leeks, and shallots outdoors.

Especially for folks who order a delivery bag for their weekly veggies, some of you may have noticed that I am continuing to make progress at shifting some of my “behind the scenes” responsibilities from my plate to other folks on the team. Molly continues to take over more of the actual CSA management as we continue to get used to the new software system. And she is doing a fantastic job during this transition. The eventual goal is for me to have my indoor roles significantly scaled back to be able to actually farm with my hands more… it’s happening little by little, and I am grateful we have such a well rounded team that it’s possible. We continue to learn and tweak the new CSA software we are using, and we hope to be over many of the humps and bumps by the time the summer season starts.

My highlight this week was getting to do some tree planting with our kiddos on my birthday. I love planting trees… maybe because I grew up with a steady diet of Captain Planet (google it if you weren’t an elementary school kid in the 90s), which infused a passion for planting as many trees possible. I’m not that good at tree planting, or at least post-planting tree care. (Many of them have died.) But it’s a great hobby, nonetheless. The kids more or less stayed interested in it for about 10% of the time….. which I consider a win for now. The most fun part for them was moving buckets of sawdust (from all the lumber milling done a couple weeks ago) around each tree as mulch.

I also got to participate in a panel discussion on moving equity forward in the food system as part of the virtual Hunger Action Conference hosted by the Vermont Food Bank, alongside 3 other women working for organizations that address food insecurity in Rutland County. It’s always a privilege to get to participate in that type of setting, and especially to hear more about how some of the network partners who we work with for charitable food distribution are expanding their equity work in relation to food access for all. Thanks to Kim at the Vermont Food Bank for facilitating such a rich discussion on an important issue.

Hope you all have a lovely week,

-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, Galen, K2, Molly, Cindy, Taylor, Vanessa, and Katie

Salad Dressing Inspirations

This week the baby lettuce and mesclun mix are both really delightful… Click on the button above to check out the link I stumbled on when looking for new salad dressing inspiration. I eat at least a bag or two of salad a day this time of year, so I really need to diversify my salad dressing game!