This Week’s Availability

This week we will have red radishes, green garlic, salad turnips, bok choi, mini red and green head lettuce, mini romaine heads, cilantro, mesclun mix, spicy greens mix, spinach, arugula, baby lettuce, rhubarb, and some plant starts for your garden*.

*If you order a bag for delivery, take note that the items labeled as “plants” are for planting, they aren’t veggies ready to eat or cut flower to display.

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

Farm News from Ryan

What a beautiful week of hot weather! We took advantage of it by postponing our transplanting until next week, and instead working at weed management. Our tractor made many passes through some of our fields on which we are trying to eliminate quack grass. If you garden, you’re probably familiar with quack grass…it has strong rhizomes—lateral underground shoots—that look like tough and sturdy roots. Quack grass has perfected the strategy of slow and steady: the rhizomes grow almost imperceptibly, but in time can take over a space right under your nose. If a few small chunks of quack grass rhizome are left in soil for a growing season, they will slowly spread, not appearing to be too much of a threat to the nearby crops. But after another year, with or without some occasional hoeing or tillage, it will develop a sturdy network of underground rhizomes, a tiny piece of which can grow into another patch. Once you have a network of rhizomes, you have a patch of thick aggressive grass, and it takes a long concerted effort to remove it.

And so, we are in a long and concerted effort to significantly reduce the quack grass population on our fields. This spring we came to the realization that our reduced tillage practices, while effective in many ways, weren’t set up with the attention to detail needed to prevent quack grass from creeping in and establishing itself on the edges of some of those fields. And so, in order continue to develop these climate-smart growing methods that can simplify our work and increase the fertility of this land, we need to make our fields free of quack grass and prevent its re-entry. The first step of this process is to use our tractor to pull a set of steel shanks through several of our fields, loosening soil and pulling the rhizomes to the surface to dry out. Because of the incredible persistence of quack grass, it needs to be done several times over several weeks, ideally in hot dry weather, followed by diligently removing by hand any shoots that remain. It is a straightforward approach and should be effective, but I also know that many times in the past I’ve been humbled by the plants we call weeds.

Otherwise, we did some hand weeding in the hot dry weather, mulched extensively, and trellised the cucumbers that are rapidly growing…it’s hard to believe that cucumbers will be ready to harvest in less than a month. And Taylor heroically packed up thousands of plants in our prop house to go into many people’s gardens. This holiday weekend looks to be good conditions for transplanting…not too cold, not too warm, with a nice soaking rain on Monday. If you keep a garden, I hope you get to enjoy some time caring for it.

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

Grilled Romaine

Have you ever had a grilled romaine Caesar salad? Totally divine. The link above describes the process better than I could.