1st Week of the Summer CSA Season: Week of June 12th

beets and scallions mulched with bark, photo by Adam Ford

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have fresh beet bunches, green garlic, salad turnips, bok choi, radishes, baby kale mix, mesclun mix, spicy greens mix, pea shoots, spinach, arugula, baby lettuce, rhubarb, and strawberries*.

*Because of the labor intensity of harvesting strawberries, they are equivalent to 2 CSA items. We grow them as an exciting addition, but we aren’t able to harvest a large amount them: most weeks they will be limited to 1 pint per CSA share. If you love larger volumes of strawberries, the closest pick your own strawberry operations we know about are Wood’s Market Garden in Brandon and Yoder Farm in Danby.

Strawberry blossoms photo by Adam Ford

Farm News

Thanks for signing up for the Summer CSA Season! If you are brand new, and have any questions about how it works that aren’t answered in the weekly email or on the website, please feel free to reach out.

Everything is looking pretty great around here. We would like a few more gentle rain storms to get the soil a little less dry, but besides that the farm has been having a fine enough spring. Plants are getting in the ground (mostly) on time, beds are getting mulched on time, the team has been doing an excellent job staying ahead of the cucumber and tomato trellising, and it only took Ryan 5 minutes to weed 900 row feet of potatoes the other day because the shredded ash bark mulch we are using this year is working nicely so far.

We scaled back on strawberry production this year due to the injuries and strain the daily hours of strawberry harvesting put on our bodies last year, and we are soon heading into strawberry and snap pea harvest season. Both of those items can be a bit slow, but so delicious… in our fantasy land, they wouldn’t be fruiting at the same time, but plants didn’t evolve based on the ideal harvest schedule for a small diversified farm. Here’s to enjoying some crunchy snap peas in a few weeks…

We transplanted the flowers in the flower garden this week, while fantasizing about how fun it will be to walk through all the flowers later this season. We also tucked in a few hundred sweet potato slips in an experimental planting into some of our cover cropped ridges that will be mulched with ash bark after the soil has had a nice amount of time to warm up. We haven’t ever had success with sweet potatoes in the past, but we keep trying new things…

Have a great week!

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

Usually we put a weekly recipe here…but the first week of the season I like pointing out that all the recipes that we post are archived on the recipe page of the website. You can search by vegetable, season, or ingredient.

Bryan weed whacking a path through the clover cover for transplanting, photo by Ryan

After the weed whacking, we lay down a row of compost and then transplant into that, photo by Ryan

compost dropped off to be spread for more transplanting, photo by Adam Ford

last of the spring lettuce in the tunnel, next to some newly transplanted peppers, photo by Adam Ford

cover crop above the barn, to be knocked down and solarized soon, photo by Adam Ford

This is one of the corn and squash fields this year. This is a mowed field of clover cover crop that we put a circle of compost down for each spot that we put winter squash and grain corn seeds into. We will mow the clover one more time before the plants start to vine out off their compost circles, but the clover will provide nitrogen and good soil cover for this field, photo by Adam Ford

Evan and Bryan rolling new fabric around the blueberry bushes… will we have blueberries this year? Who knows, fingers crossed! photo by Adam Ford

the later tomatoes got trellised, photo by Adam Ford

This is another squash and grain corn field with rows of compost where we seeded squash and corn in between a thriving field pea cover crop. We will also mow this cover crop down before the plants vine out, and the peas will provide fertility and cover to this soil, photo by Cindy

Ryan and Bryan putting away the pre-order plant display for the season… That was fun! Over 10,000 plants out the door to some exciting gardens this summer, woohoo! photo by Adam Ford

Bella and Noel chilling in the shade, photo by Adam Ford

mulched pepper field, photo by Adam Ford

photo by Adam Ford

soon to be covered in climbing flowers, photo by Adam Ford

Ryan checking underneath the clear plastic preparing a field for planting, photo by Adam Ford

veggies in the display cooler… salad turnips new to you? they are so sweet and delicious raw, photo by Adam Ford

purple and white alyssum are excellent habitat for beneficial insects in the field, photo by Adam Ford

Mama and baby robins perched on top of the field tools outside the barn. We really enjoy seeing all the birds’ next around the farm this time of year. It is a nice feeling to see that this little zone is a hospitable place to raise some young song birds… we just want to give them the memo to stay away from the strawberry field and the elderberry bushes, photo by Adam Ford

Katie, Vanessa, Kara, and K2 harvesting from a weedy spinach field, but we still got a lot of lovely spinach from this patch, photo by Adam Ford

plants are art, photo by Adam Ford

You all getting ready for these in a couple weeks? This little cucumber baby looks spiny now, but it’s a slicing cucumber that will grow into itself with much smoother skin when it’s ready… I know this is less common, but I look forward to the first cucumber more than the first tomato! photo by Ryan

Looks like this nest has been flown from, and perfect timing, since it’s tucked up under our canoe, and we will be taking it out next weekend for the first river paddle of the year, photo by Adam Ford

before long, zukes and squash will be rolling in, photo by Adam Ford

mulched peppers (and dandelion), photo by Adam Ford

strawberries protected under netting, photo by Adam Ford

tomatoes are green for a LOOONG time, photo by Adam Ford

peas still looking good! photo by Adam Ford