4th Week of the Spring CSA: April 14 - 16

Apr 10

*the ground posts, bows, and purlins going up for the prop house extension, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

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

*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

*garlic poking through the mulch! photo by Adam Ford*

Summer CSA Signup

Thanks to everyone who signed up for the summer CSA. If you haven’t yet, and you are planning on it, you can sign up here. Also, the Northeast Farming Association runs a cost share program for CSA shares for families who qualify. If you would benefit from financial support, check out their application.

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

*the bonus of having a greenhouse for our farm is playing around with propagating our houseplants before bringing them back inside, photo by Adam Ford*

*salad turnips, still growing, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

(Optional bonus reading)

Ryan here again! One of the themes of the past week has been a deep spring cleaning...we’ve gone through many of our spaces and supplies to really work at having an organized space for all the supplies we use. There’s such a wide variety of tools and materials that we use on this diverse farm: harvesting tools and supplies, irrigation pipe and fittings, landscape fabric and row cover of different dimensions, greenhouse trays of different types, tractor implements, trellising supplies, hand tools...it can seem like an endless task to create an organized home for everything we use to keep this farm running! But we’ve made great progress so far and we’re all really excited to have a more organized space to work in.

*Cindy used the slab ‘waste’ from our lumber pile to make this organized storage zone for our team’s hand tools! photo by Adam Ford*

One of biggest joys for me this week was driving our tractor down what we call the ‘open’ field--the field beyond the barn to the right of the driveway. As I drove down the gravel pathway, it felt wonderful to see the condition of each of our 1/10 acre plots on either side of me. Every single one of the 15 plots was growing a healthy cover crop, covered with straw mulch, covered with a fabric tarp, or freshly seeded. All of the plots felt particularly well cared for. It reminded me of a very different feeling I had in the spring of 2019--a feeling of uneasiness seeing wide expanses of bare soil on our fields after the snow receded. That spring was a real doozy for us, with two intense rainstorms before June that caused significant erosion on our fields. It was a time of transitioning some of our growing practices that left our fields especially bare and vulnerable, and the erosion that we experienced then was probably the biggest driving factor that led us to develop our current land layout of 1/10 acre plots separated by swales to control water movement on our farm.

This photo from May 2019 shows what was probably the worst erosion our farm has experienced, and what really sped up our efforts to develop the much improved growing practices that we continue to enhance these days. (Alright, Kara here to chime in… I want to respectfully argue that the worst erosion our farm has experienced was when a river re-routed itself through our farmland during Irene… and we moved to this new spot, and now we get pretty stressed out with any erosion. But yeah, the spring rainstorms of 2019 were also a bummer.)

Remembering that recent spring made it especially rewarding to see the results of our efforts the past two years to take better care of the land that supports us and grows all this food for so many people. (Check out the pictures below of all the covered plots that made my day to drive past.) We’ve learned a lot in that time and are excited to continue to learn about the possibilities of growing food on this land in a way that improves the health and productivity of our soil over the long term. I’m especially excited to be involved in a program called the Climate Adaptation Fellowship https://www.adaptationfellows.net/, in which farmers and technical advisors work together to explore on-farm implementation of practices to mitigate climate change (storing carbon in the soil) and adapt to the effects of climate change. I’m working with Becky Maden of the University of Vermont Extension to do some experiments and data collection on some no-till vegetable production techniques. I look forward to sharing a little bit of what we learn over this summer!

Have a great week!

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

*Taylor harvesting baby lettuce from this gorgeous, packed tunnel, 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 saag paneer.

Get The Recipe