*These cucumber plants will be producing by the middle of June…amazing! (I get more excited for the first cucumbers than the first tomatoes, so I am pumped!) photo by Adam Ford.*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have spinach, green curly kale, baby kale, baby chard, baby lettuce, claytonia, baby arugula, pea shoots, parsley, red beets, yellow beets, carrots, onions, daikon radishes, watermelon radish, kohlrabi, and red and yellow potatoes.

*carrots, onions, and beets are sourced from Juniper Hill Farm, also certified organic

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag

Ordering closes at noon on Tuesdays for Wednesday bags, and at midnight on Wednesdays for Friday bags.

You do not need to fill out the form if you plan to come to the barn on Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Farm News

Well first off, I want to clarify that last week’s post about our participation in a Martian agricultural study was a fictitious April Fool’s joke…. my apologies that wasn’t clear to everyone. (I have no doubt that extra-terrestrial food production is probably being studied, but we are not involved in it!) We are only planning to farm on Earth.

This week Ryan and Cindy finished getting the new pellet furnace hooked up in the propagation house, and Ryan got it running for its inaugural night. It’s a bit finnicky, but I am sure we will get used to it soon. He had a bit of a sleepless night last night getting the hoper to feed properly, but we anticipate it not needing any middle of the night visits soon. It’s VERY COOL to have this backup heat for our little baby plants. Ryan also snuck in the first round of outdoor seeding in a field above the tunnels! This is exciting, and also essential to having all the successions of early spring greens we need to keep the spring CSA season bountiful. It’s possible for us to get in the outdoor ground so early because we don’t need to prepare the growing space with a heavy tractor that would compact this wet, spring soil, and also probably get stuck. With our use of low- and no- till methods in certain fields, along with the use of tarps, we are able to prepare field space by hand this early in the season. He got baby lettuce, baby kale, spinach, arugula, bok choi, radishes, and salad turnips seeded for some later spring harvesting.

The team continued to seed and repot lots and lots and lots of plants in the propagation house. It’s so nice we have the extra space in there this year, and it’s also filling up quickly. Lots of fully harvested plant debris keeps getting removed from the tunnels to make way for new seedings. And I love watching the earliest tomato and cucumber plants growing and thriving, waiting to be transplanted in the tunnel in just a few weeks!

I enjoyed reading this article this week about the potential sentient nature of bees. One day this winter that I was walking the dogs, I found a lost and probably slowly dying honey bee about 50 feet from the hive, and I was feeling really sad about probably watching her last moments on this earth in the icy tundra it seemed to be tripping over as she drunkenly wandered around. I picked her up, and walked her over to the hive, sentimentally hoping I could put her on its doorstep, and then she could scurry inside and join the warm huddle inside. She did no such thing, and actually after a moment, flopped back off the hive entrance into the snow. So I picked her up again and just held her, and watched her, and thanked her for sharing this little corner of the earth with our family, and pollinating all the blooms. After awhile of sitting and holding I felt a bit intrusive… like this bee did not actually invite me to interrupt her earthly exit, and I am potentially this giant overwhelming monster staring at her during a pivotal transition she obviously sought some privacy during. So I put a little kiss on her head, placed some dead, dried grape leaves on the snow in a protected little footprint hole, and put the bee on top of it. After reading the article above, I would like to think the bee knew I was sending it care and gratitude, despite showing up uninvited. Who knows. The bees are coming and going these warm, sunny days, and there are some tiny, early rock irises in one little area of a garden I have seen them frequent. More food will be coming soon, bees, hang in there!

Have a great week,

ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, Galen, Taylor, Cindy, Katie, K2, (and Sky and Soraya)