*cucumber plants waiting to be planted in the tunnel this week, 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, spinach*, green curly kale, chard, baby kale mix, baby lettuce, pea shoots, parsley, and arugula.

The pea shoots and arugula will be especially wonderful this week!

*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.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

*last week I had a picture of garlic in this spot, growing beautifully through straw mulch… now it still looks gorgeous poking through the snow, 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? Ordering on our pre-order system ends on April 20th, so do it now! We grow certified organic herb, flower, vegetable, and some fruit starts for your garden.

Order Garden Starts

Farm News

(Optional bonus reading)

For folks who get CSA bags delivered, you probably noticed that we started sending out reminder emails on the day to pick up your bag. As a mom of a 2 1/2 and 4 year old, trying to keep up with my job running a farm, I assure you all that I would personally never remember to place an order or pickup my veggies… And I would need all the reminders I could get! We plan to make reminders a weekly thing, but if for some reason you don’t notice a reminder after this becomes the new normal, and it makes you wonder if the veggies actually got delivered, you can count on them being there.

For folks who pick up veggies at the barn, you may have noticed some gorgeous tulip bouquets in the barn this week! If you love flowers, Mary Jo at www.blumevermont.com has spring flowers available now through Mothers’ Day, and her floral CSA starts June 16th (which she delivers here if you pick up veggies at the barn.) You can reach her through her website, instagram: blumevt, and by phone: 802-353-8434.

Hi again, Ryan here for the third week that I’ve taken on this portion of the newsletter...lately I’ve been a little more inspired to put thoughts into writing, and composing this part of our weekly newsletter is a little thing I can do to take a small amount of computer work off of Kara’s plate. When we started our very first market garden in 2009, I don’t think either of us had any idea the level of office-work that our farm would one day take on, and the extent to which Kara would take on that part of our farm’s work… Thank you Kara! I’ll plan on writing many of the farm updates going forward… though I have no doubt that Kara will insert her editorial perspective when it diverges too far from my own!

The theme for this week’s farm news is a celebration of the life of plants! This time of the year is truly one of my favorites, seeing life ever so slowly but unstoppably return to the grasses, dandelions, clovers, flower bulbs, lilacs, maples, apples and plums. When poor weather like Friday’s snow comes, I try to think like a plant. They just slow down their productivity a little bit and pick right back up when the snow melts and the sun comes back out. The spring is unstoppable.

My most vivid experience this week working with plants was an interesting and new experiment with an apple tree: it speaks to the sense of curiosity and amazement I can feel about plants and working with them. On an 8 year old apple tree near our home, I found evidence of the Round Headed Apple Borer, a beetle that lays eggs on apple trunks. These eggs hatch into larva that burrow into the bark and feed on the cambium--the living tissue in the bark that exchanges water and nutrients between the roots and the leaves. If damage is severe, it can destroy the cambium layer, killing the tree. The damage on this particular tree was severe, not yet girdling the tree but destroying a large part of its vascular system. We tried an interesting approach to solve the problem, illustrated in the pictures below.

As far as the actual news of the farm goes, this week featured a dramatic transformation of the Trunchbull (the first tunnel when you drive in), with our team removing beds of baby lettuce, parsley, chard, and pea shoots to make way for the first cucumbers and tomatoes to be planted. It’s always exciting--and slightly nerve-wracking--to plant our first summer crops in April. Unlike the hardy greens of the winter that can tolerate frost, these first vining crops of the summer depend on our wood pellet boiler to supplement heat on cold nights. This time of the spring is a time when we’re most attached to being in this place...rolling the sides of the tunnels up and down to keep temperatures from being too hot and too cold, keeping a close eye on monitoring our heating infrastructure, and giving each other lots of reminders in the evenings…”Did you close up the greenhouse tonight??”

Wishing everyone a week with at least some stirrings of new and beautiful spring growth!

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

*view through the barn, 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 baked potatoes with a cheesy spinach sauce. Also, check out this delicious radish top pesto recipe shared by a CSA member, which will totally come in handy this season!

Get The Recipe