15th Week of the Summer CSA Season: Week of September 17th

Sep 14

*fall greens look beautiful, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have

Greens: baby lettuce, spinach, arugula, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, rainbow chard, brussels crowns, bok choi
Roots: carrots, new yellow potatoes, new red potatoes
Alliums: onions, garlic, scallions, garlic scapes, shallots, leeks
Fruiting Crops: tomatoes*, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, sweet Italian Carmen peppers, red bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, spaghetti squash, husk cherries, green beans, green tomatoes
Herbs and Miscellaneous: parsley, rhubarb, celery, cilantro, broccolini

*The large tomatoes have slowed waaaay down in ripening, so instead of listing them separately on the order site as beefsteak and heirloom, we are listing them together, because we just don’t know what volume of either will be ready for this week. If you have a preference for beefsteak or heirloom when you order “tomatoes” for the week, you can make that note in the comment section, and we will do our best, but just know you may get one type or the other. Thanks!

We listed several items available for bulk purchasing at wholesale pricing on the online platform. This week we have garlic, onions, brussels crowns, carmen, and frozen elderberries available in bulk amounts if you do any preserving for winter. If you pick up at the barn and want to order any of those items in bulk, just send us an email.

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

*broccolini getting washed, photo by Katie Hollebeek*

*cherry tomatoes coming in, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This time of year is a big transition time around here… not quite as wild as spring, but close behind. We rip out the summer plants from the tunnels, thank them for their abundance, add the plant material to the compost piles, top off the beds with finished compost, and plant 3 tunnels of winter greens. We also harvest out the last bits of crops from certain fields outside to make them available for the last round of cover crop seeding of the season.

Last fall Ryan experimented with growing cover crops on a field he created ridges of soil in. The oats and peas died over the winter and then we set a band of compost on the top of the ridge before planting onions. The valleys in between the ridges were heavily mulched with straw. This method grew excellent onions, and we were able to judicially use compost just down a line where the onions grew, versus covering an entire 48-inch bed top with compost.

Based on that experimental success, before cover cropping this fall, Ryan created a few fields with ridged, seeded cover crops, and then Bryan and Ryan flattened the tops of the ridges. Because it’s been so dry, with no rain in the forecast, Ryan put some irrigation on the seeded fields to get a good germination of those cover crop seeds. These ridged fields will grow a cover crop blend of winter field peas and triticale (a wheat/rye hybrid). This cover crop will overwinter and will grow vigorously in the spring. When it starts flowering we will mow the tops of the ridges, flatten all the cover crop stems into the valleys, and set bands of compost on top of those ridges. We are optimistic that this will be an effective way to grow really healthy vegetables.

Creating ridges is a soil disturbance under the wide umbrella of “tillage”. While there are many farms that use no tillage at all—and other farms that use tillage in ways that undermine the fertility of the land they manage—it’s too simple to say that all tillage is “bad” and withholding all tillage is “good” for managing agricultural land. The tillage involved in preparing the soil in these fields includes subsoiling: pulling a beefy metal shank through the soil to loosen up the hard compacted subsoil in our glacially deposited soils. Thoroughly loosening this compacted subsoil can allow plant roots to penetrate deeper into the soil, and can improve the ability of soil microbes to access the oxygen and nitrogen in our atmosphere. It will also improve the ability of our soil to infiltrate water into deeper soil layers, providing a greater water reserve for plants in times of limited rainfall. Growing a robust network of cover crop roots in this newly disturbed soil will create a network of channels to organize the newly loosened soil. These plant roots and their associated symbiotic microbial communities will bind individual soil particles together. This process, known as soil aggregation, “glues” soil particles together into aggregates that keep them stable while allowing pore spaces for air and water to move through the soil. Well aggregated soil functions like the inside of a loaf of bread, whereas poorly aggregated soil is more like a pile of loose flour. While water can readily infiltrate a loaf of bread, it would run right off the surface of the flour, carving channels out of the pulverized particles. Years ago our farm relied on a rototiller to prepare our soil for planting, and we saw first hand how the repeated pulverization of our soil led to the decrease in the fertility of our soil. We’re grateful that we’ve learned different forms of tillage and growing practices that allow us to grow healthy and abundant crops without undermining the health of our soil. One of the big advantages of setting up ridges in this way is that after this initial and significant soil disturbance, these ridges will remain in place for several years with little if any soil disturbance.

We got the grain corn harvested this week after the blue jays had a true jubilee ravaging it. (But we still got plenty!) We pulled the husks back and set them to dry with fans in the root cellar. And we got most of the cured onions clipped and into root cellar storage as well. Next week we will try to get all the winter greens transplanted into the first tunnel, and then start removing plants from the next tunnels for the same transition.

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

Sauteed Brussels Crowns with Garlic and Sweet Red Peppers