I can’t get enough of these gorgeous cover crop pictures…. seeing well covered soil makes me feel a sense of optimism for our climatic future because I imagine all the other small farms around the world who are also committed to being a puzzle piece… — I can’t get enough of these gorgeous cover crop pictures…. seeing well covered soil makes me feel a sense of optimism for our climatic future because I imagine all the other small farms around the world who are also committed to being a puzzle piece in the climate solution, photo by Adam Ford

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow onions, carrots, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, fingerling potatoes, spinach, mesclun mix, scallions, green garlic, green curly kale, chard, pea shoots, parsley, and arugula.

We may also be able to harvest a small amount of baby lettuce, (it’s the in between plantings dance), so if you prefer having some packed in your bag this week, make a note in your order form in the comment section with what you would want swapped out if we are able to harvest it.

What is green garlic? Green garlic is a bunch of tender, early garlic plants that you can use the entire plant of (green parts and white) as if they are garlic flavored scallions.

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

*but this happened this week, too… another round of 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

Farm News

(Optional bonus reading)

So this is cool: This week we are harvesting the first greens from an outdoor planting for the season. This is the earliest we have ever harvested outdoor greens, (it’s never happened for us in April), and it was thanks to the very early warm and dry spell. (And let’s be real, also because Ryan didn’t waste a second, jumped right on it, and walked the seeder more than 2 1/2 miles that first day to capitalize on that warm window… thanks, Ryan!)

*Sky helping Ryan inspect the gorgeous mesclun mix hidden under the row cover to plan for this week’s harvest.*

This was a busy week, but we obviously have to highlight how exciting it is that the team transplanted the first round of tomatoes and cucumbers into the tunnel! (Just in time for the low 20s we got at night, so our pellet boiler was cranking out the heat to keep things alive and well.)

*rows and rows of eager tomatoes and cucumber, photo by Adam Ford*

We also seeded and repotted an enormous amount of plants from all the pre-orders we are managing through the website system. (If you missed out on that deadline, don’t worry, we will have some extra plants we will make available at CSA pickup at the end of May and early June.) It’s quite an endeavor to start, nurture, organize, and pack all these plants for more than 100 different home gardens. Perhaps it’s a bit too chaotic for our lifestyle right now, still only having a fraction of the childcare we used to have before the pandemic started, but I am drawn to this part of the farm because it connects me to all the excitement, optimism, and potential of so many different people’s gardens. I love tucking in a little baby pepper plant into a larger cup, and imagining someone a few months from now picking a perfectly ripe pepper from the raised bed on the edge of their patio, and just crunching into it, delighted at what they were able to grow.

Next up, we will be transplanting all the onions, leeks, early kales, kohlrabi, cabbage, broccoli, and head lettuce into the fields outside. So exciting.

This week I have been thinking a lot about the emotions I feel around different plants. After my kids are asleep for the night, I try to sneak in some fast paced hikes around the woods, hayfields, and hills in our neighborhood with our dogs. There is a lot of topographic variety in this area, including some old copperas mines operated in the early 1800s, abandoned roads (like when our road, Shunpike, the alternative to the main toll road, went all the way over the hill and connected with Shunpike Road in Mount Holly), hayfields that are being brought back to life with new seeding and management, wet ash forests, aromatic pine forest, active sugarbushes, a rock pile to scramble up to be able to see our old farm on Route 103, and the high voltage power line that provides a sweet, unofficial ski trail in the winter. Sometimes I catch the sun, sometimes I’m scurrying around with a headlamp. It’s the only time I am able to turn my brain off from parenting or managing a farm, so it’s essential recharge time.

On one of these walks this week, I was focusing on the plant life that way tenaciously poking up and holding the ground on a gravely old logging road, just completely admiring how it was able to flourish in these worn out, scrappy spaces. I was especially appreciating the coltsfoot and mullein, and their ability to look like a million bucks even as they grew through what seemed like only gravel and bedrock. Most of the time in my life, especially during this pandemic, I feel like I operate from a space of a fair bit of chaos, a way overloaded plate, and a sense of depletion with not enough nourishment for the volume of tasks I juggle. But as I was jogging over these coltsfoot and mullein in their rough, rocky rooting space, they would spring right back up after my dogs or I trampled them. The coltsfoot added a joyful color among the grayness of the gravel road, and the mullein added a sense of comfort and welcoming with its fuzzy leaves, in an otherwise jagged and hard surface. And they both seemed to be excelling at their roles of photosynthesizing, respiring, making me smile, and maybe one day being picked for medicinal winter teas. This particular gravel road is full of them, and as I watched them, it felt like they were inviting me to know how possible it is to still be bright and fuzzy, that I am probably doing a good enough job at all the things, even when my foundation feels depleted and impossible… because there are hidden resources below that surface.

I hope you all have your own little “coltsfoot” and “mullein” to remind you how good you are doing at life, even when it feels impossible. Have a great week!

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

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 spinach enchiladas.

Get The Recipe