*eager little allium seedlings, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow onions, red onions, red beets, carrots, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, fingerling potatoes, sweet potatoes, broccoli raab*, mesclun mix, spinach**, green curly kale, chard, baby kale mix, baby lettuce, pea shoots, and parsley.

*read about the broccoli raab in the farm news section below

**Love spinach? Want to preserve some or do a big spinach project? Send an email for us to pack your bulk spinach order for when you pickup your veggies at the barn, or put a note in the comment section of your order form: $8 for 1-pound bags, $22 for 3-pound bags, and $34 for 5-pound bags.

If you are coming to the farm to pick out your veggies from the display cooler, you don’t need to use the order form below.

CSA Bag Delivery Order Form

Fill out the delivery form by noon on Tuesdays.

Note for Ludlow deliveries: Pickup is now on the side porch of Okemo Mountain School at 53 Main Street in Ludlow.

Need a reminder where all the CSA pickup and delivery day and time options are? Click the button below.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Katie bringing in a pea shoot harvest, and Molly wheel hoeing that patch in as soon as it’s harvested… We turn beds over that quickly in the indoor spaces to maximize production in these areas, photo by Adam Ford

Summer CSA Signup

If you are planning to do the summer CSA, sign up here. We don’t need any payment when you sign up, but getting a sense of how many members we are planning for is especially helpful this time of year as we start all the long season crops. The summer CSA is our biggest membership season, and last year we dramatically changed our growing and marketing due to the pandemic. Now that we no longer attend farmers’ markets, we enjoy the attention we are able to give to the CSA details, and the expanded varieties of summer veggies we plan to grow, so at this point we plan to continue only running a CSA without attending farmers’ markets. The summer is also the CSA season we tend to have the most room for new folks to join, so feel free to let your family and friends know about the CSA if you think they would like it. Signing up for a summer CSA share early is a nice gift for our planning brains.

Summer CSA Details

Planning a garden for the summer?

Are you planning a summer garden? We grow certified organic herb, flower, vegetable, and some fruit starts for your garden. Click below for our online plant sales to pre-order spring plants for your garden. The pre-order option will be available until April 19th.

Order Garden Starts

Farm News

(Optional bonus reading)

Ryan here, giving Kara a week off from writing! This week features a fun and highly seasonal vegetable...broccoli raab! (This delicious green might more accurately be called ‘kale raab’ since it comes from our overwintered kale plants...but it’s appearance, use, flavor, and genetics are almost identical to the more familiar broccoli raab.) Kale is a biennial vegetable, meaning that it devotes its first year to leafy growth, and after the winter, begins it’s 2nd year by rapidly transitioning to reproductive (flowering) growth. Our kale plants now look unique in the tunnels, putting out smaller and smaller leaves as they reach upwards with loose broccoli-like florets. The ‘broccoli raab’ is a real treat, available only this week and possibly next. The leaves, stems, and flowers are all exceptionally tender, and it is excellent roasted, grilled, sauteed, or steamed; in quiche, pasta, tarts, pizza, soups, or as a simple side with olive oil, salt, and a splash of lemon juice. Imagine them like tender asparagus with a broccoli flavor.

*Use the entire plant if you choose this veggie… stems, leaves, and flowers.*

This time of the year is one of my favorite times to be in the high tunnels. As the last of the piles of snow finally recede and the garlic just barely peeks above the straw mulch, the greens in our high tunnels are in full swing with the boundless growth the spring brings to them. Having survived the cold and dark months of the winter, they don’t mind at all the stretches of wind, snow, and chilly days that come and go these weeks in April. On a cool sunny day, it’s especially a joy to walk through the tunnel, sensing the warm air, the scent of the rich soil, and the abundance of the greens. If you come to the farm to pick up your vegetables, feel free to walk through any of the 3 high tunnels to see the gardens of greens growing in there. Since we’re not through Covid yet, just wear your mask if you want to check out the tunnels.

Last year we discovered a fun trick to grow more greens in our tunnels. The kale in the photo below was planted last September and harvested all through the winter. As the plants grow taller and the kale leaves are harvested from the bottom up, we start lettuce seeds in January and plant them below the kale trees in February. Soon, as we harvest the last of the kale plants beginning to flower, we will remove the kale stalks and the lettuce will have that space all to itself. By planting the lettuce in the space made as kale leaves are harvested, we’re able to start harvesting the lettuce as soon as the kale is done producing.

*kale canopy with baby lettuce understory*

This past snowy Thursday our farm team was able to take on some major upkeep on the greens in our tunnels. Years ago during the winter of 2014-2015 we were scrambling to build the home we live in now, and we put much less energy into managing our tunnels. That winter we allowed a lot of grasses and other winter annual weeds to set seed in the spring. Since then we’ve worked hard to try to reduce the weed seedbank in our high tunnels so that we might not need to put so much energy into managing those weeds in the future. Most of this weed management we try to do in the fall before we even plant our crops: by removing the tomato plants, watering the soil to encourage weed seeds to germinate, and then lightly raking the soil and allowing it to dry out in order to kill the delicate young weed seedlings, after which we seed or transplant our crops into the soil.

This time of year, is the other end of the cycle, where the weeds we missed are getting ready to flower and it’s our last chance to remove them before they set seed. Our team pulled out quite a bit of dandelions, grasses, and chickweed. If we didn’t pull these plants from the tunnels, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of tiny seeds would have been dispersed throughout our soil!

The grasses in this area would overtake the baby red kale after the next harvest.  Fortunately not much of our tunnels is as weedy as this area! — *The grasses in this area would overtake the baby red kale after the next harvest. Fortunately not much of our tunnels is as weedy as this area!*

*It’s quite a haul of spring weeding from our 3 tunnels!*

We potted up the next round of tomato plants, transplanted baby bok choi and salad turnips, and continued seeding many, many varieties of veggies to transplant this spring. Cindy and I started building a new cover system for one of the tables in the propagation house, so we don’t have to trip over the row cover we move on and off the baby seedlings this time of year. And Cindy keeps putting in a lot of time addressing our organizational systems in the barn. This week we plan to pot up lots of baby pepper plants and various herb plants as everything keeps growing out of their spots in the warm grow room.

Have a great week!

-ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, Katie, Sam, Cindy, Grace, Molly, and Taylor

*Sky runs around outside looking for things like this and then shouting, “look! signs of spring!” photo by Adam Ford*

Weekly Recipe

Molly has been busy uploading years of older recipes to the new recipe index on the website site so that you can easily search and browse all the ones that we haves shared in the past. Eventually all the historical recipes will be there. Below is the button for this week’s featured recipe for kale raab and onion tart.

Get The Recipe