5th Week of the Summer CSA Season: Week of July 9th

Jul 4

*Galen harvesting sugar snap peas, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

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

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

*brussels sprouts looking good in their mulched strips among the clover cover crop, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

When I started getting drawn in by farming as a form of climate action in my early 20s, I read a lot of Wendell Berry, and this week I saw a quote from his collection of essays, The Long-Legged House, making its rounds on the internet, that spoke to me then and continues to guide my work as a farmer:

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world… We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits.” (Italicization is my own emphasis.)

The concept of yielding to the limits of the earth seems so profoundly outside of the discussions of climate solutions. I’m grateful to have experienced the gift of a attending a small farm camp as a kid where there was a strong emphasis on being mindful of our consumption as the first step of living within the limits of the earth’s resources. While we have been dedicated installing solar panels and electrifying everything that we can, the general rate of consumption of the average American is too much to electrify our way out of the moment we are in. Rereading Wendell Berry reminds me that collectively, we need to learn what is good for the world and that leaning into that goodness for the world would inherently be good for us. Farming puts us up against limits daily: the time we have to tend to all the tasks, the resources we have to grow food and solve problems, the strain we put on our bodies to work physical labor jobs, etc. Everything is finite, so within that context, it’s worth reimagine what we actually need.

Have a great week,

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

Roasted Salad Turnips and Radishes