3rd Week of the Summer CSA Season: Week of June 25th

Jun 22

*Taylor and Katie harvesting beets, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have fresh beet bunches, fresh carrot bunches, scallions, slicing cucumbers, broccolini, garlic scapes*, salad turnips, bok choi, radishes, cilantro, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, rainbow chard, baby kale mix, pea shoots, spinach, arugula, baby lettuce, rhubarb, sugarsnap peas, some summer squash, green zucchini, and costata romanesco zucchini**.

*Garlic scapes are a seasonal treat I absolutely love. They are the flower top of a garlic plant that we snap off this time of year to force the plant to put energy into making larger bulbs. The scapes are tender and garlicky and can be used like garlic. We especially love making garlic scape pesto with it, which is generally garlic scapes, olive oil, sunflower seeds, salt, and lemon, and is excellent on anything. You can also toss garlic scapes with olive oil and salt and put them on the grill and they end up like a lovely garlicky grilled asparagus experience.

**Costata romanesco is an Italian heirloom zucchini variety, with a less watery texture and a delicious, nutty flavor as compared to a traditional green zucchini. I wouldn’t describe myself as a traditional zucchini fan, but I really enjoy cooking with and eating the costata romanesco variety.

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

This is a brussels sprout field planted directly into a killed cover crop. The tall rye/clover cover crop was flattened and tarped with old greenhouse plastic during an early June hot spell, to kill the rye from the intense heat under the clear plastic. You can see how effectively the cover crop has been turned into a mulch! However, it was not hot enough at the soil level to kill the thousands of tiny germinating purslane seeds: a heat-loving succulent weed that you probably have encountered in your garden. So this field is being mulched with a thick layer of ash bark to smother those weeds. To speed up the mulch application process, Ryan and Cindy put together these 2x4s, set over the little brussels sprouts transplants so the mulch could be applied rapidly without smothering the small seedlings. Farmers are always coming up with clever ways to speed up the work! photo by Ryan

Farm News

Another great week around here: the second field of brussels sprouts were planted, SO MANY tomato and cucumber plants were trellised and pruned, the last round of potatoes were planted, some weeding was attended to, more mulching, and some other smaller transplantings were put out. When the cucumber plants were trellised, they were tall enough this week to lower the plants on their rolling trellis, which I am really tickled by. I love the possibility for cucumber plants to gross excessively tall, but to also be able to lower the vines so they harvest is always within reach without stilts. (And yes, we do have a pair of drywall stilts that have been used for tall cherry tomato harvests!)

This week’s good news in farming is that the Vermont legislature was able to override the governor’s veto on H.706, the Pollinator Protection Act, that was overwhelmingly supported by the vast majority of the Vermont farming community. This is an important first step in protecting pollinators from toxic neonicotinoids, and therefor protecting our food supply by doing what we can as humans to preserve pollinators into the future.

This week, as a person who didn’t grow up in a community celebrating the importance of Juneteenth, I spent some time sitting with how as a parent and farmer, I can support meaningful space and moments for this holiday with our kids and farm since farming is so deeply intertwined with historical and continued institutional racism. High Mowing Seeds (the organic seed company we get most of our seeds from) shared this, that I loved: “On Juneteenth, we honor the end of slavery in the United States, commemorating the day news of emancipation finally reached enslaved people in Galveston, Texas. Today, we celebrate the liberation of enslaved Africans and African-Americans and recognize the ongoing struggle against racism in its many forms.⁠ We acknowledge that agriculture carries a long legacy of racism, from stolen land to slavery, indentured servitude, segregation, unequal access to agricultural resources, and more. Land is intertwined with the harm inflicted upon it and through it.⁠ As an organic seed company, we see seeds as symbols of hope and vehicles of justice. Not only do they represent new beginnings, but they also serve as archives of the past. Seeds anchor us to place and to each other, as we seek to create a more just and equitable future.” It is our hope that our work of growing vegetables can be done in a way that is building a more equitable future for everyone.

Next week we will do some catch up weeding, plant an experimental patch of different strawberries for next year, mulch a few more zones, and continue to trellis all the wild plants in the tunnel…. they just keep growing!

Have a great week,

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

Garlic Scape Carrot Top Pesto

Plain garlic scape pesto is a true favorite around here, but this recipe is a twist on that favorite and uses the tops of carrots as well!