*peaking into the tunnel…. these snow piles are almost all gone, photo by Ryan*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: spinach, pea shoots, mesclun mix, baby lettuce, curly kale, baby chard, and green cabbage
Roots: carrots, yellow potatoes, rutabaga, Gilfeather turnip, red beets, chioggia beets, watermelon radish, daikon radish
Alliums: onions, garlic, shallots, and leeks

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

*kales and scallions with hoops to help the row cover move on and off them, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

It’s been a characteristic spring week with warm sunshiney days that are cooking us out of the propagation house while we seed, and then gray, windy, snowy days that force our winter boots back on and keep our fingers damp and cold while we harvest greens from the tunnels. But I love the wildness of spring, the fickleness of the season who can’t pick a lane, “Am I winter, am I summer, am I something else entirely?” Transition seasons are supposed to be some of everything, and so far, March is not disappointing.

We continued getting more trays seeded in the prop house, and the most exciting thing was that Ryan was able to get some outdoor seeding in the ground this week. It’s such a delight to get the first round of outdoor things in the ground this early in the spring. It really makes our tunnel transitions a bit easier to have enough things growing outside later during the spring CSA season to harvest, while we remove winter plantings to make way for early spring transplants in the tunnels. He was able to seed carrots, beets, lettuce, mesclun mix, baby kale, baby chard, radishes, bok choi, and other fast growing items. We tuck them in with row cover to help mitigate the coolness of the soil this time of year. The moisture of the soil from the snow melt will help germination. We are able to get in the ground so early because of the growing methods we use: The low- and no-till beds that are mulched or in various stages of decomposition allow us to walk a push seeded up and down the bed without other preparation. If we needed our tractor or heavy equipment to prepare a bed this time of year, we would have to wait much longer for the soil to dry out.

This upcoming week we will be pretty busy in the propagation house. The crop schedule this week has us seeding 65 trays of various veggies, as well as repotting the first round of tomatoes and peppers (several hundred plants) into their larger containers so they have more room to grow. This means they will move out from their cozy grow room in the root cellar, out into the propagation house. Once these frost sensitive crops get moved out there, we have alarms on our phones to let us know if the temperature is getting too low. Fingers crossed, we won’t hear many alerts on the phones… that the heated table system and backup pellet heater will keep operating as they should. But those sensors are part of the system because at least a couple times each spring, there is something to futz with, and it’s important to get the heads up before all our tiny little heat loving plants get zapped by the cold. It’s a short season that we have to stay connected to our phones like that, but a pretty crucial piece of the season not to mess up. Hats off to Ryan for doing all the late night baby plants management!

Have a great week,

-ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, K2, Cindy, Taylor, Leah, Natalie, and Hannah (and Sky and Soraya)

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