This Week’s Availability

The greens are growing again…no item limits on greens this week!

This week we will have yellow onions, red onions, red beets, carrots, seconds carrots, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, fingerling potatoes, watermelon radish, sweet potatoes, mini mixed roots, mesclun mix, spinach, kale, chard, pea shoots, and parsley.

This week we will offer “seconds carrots” in addition to the normal carrots. They are broken carrots or ones that had bad ends that we chopped off. So the actual carrots you will receive will be great, but smaller chunks. 3 pounds will be an item, which is twice the amount of the normal carrot “item.”

You do not need to use the order form if you are coming to the farm to pick out your veggies from the display cooler.

CSA Bag Delivery Order Form

Fill out the delivery form by noon on Tuesdays.

Need a reminder where all the CSA pickup and delivery day and time options are?

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Planning a garden for the summer?

Click below for our online plant sales to pre-order spring plants for your garden.

Order Garden Starts

Farm News

Molly’s second door on the propagation house has arrived and it’s gorgeous… no surprises there. And it was just in time! This week we started up the prop house to have more room to continue to start long season crops, since our grow room was totally full. We seeded another several hundred tomato plants, husk cherries and over 2000 pepper plants, along with onions, leeks, and other early season crops.

We start seeds differently than most veggie operations. Most propagation houses are heated with air heat so their entire space stays warm enough for the seedlings. We have always felt this might be an unnecessary amount of heating and energy consumption, so we learned from other farms and installed a system that circulates hot water through tubes right on top of the table that the seedlings go on. And that whole table has a setup up like a “mini greenhouse” with the ability to roll a plastic cover right over that table to keep that heat right where we need it. This has allowed us to heat these early seedlings with hot water powered by our solar panels versus air heat that is typically done with a fossil fuel source. We love it even if it’s a bit more work, and a bit more risky.

In hobby land, Ryan tapped the few trees we do each year with the kiddos to simmer on our woodstove inside. (We usually make a few quarts each year, and the kids obviously love the process.)

This week’s agricultural highlight for women’s history month is on Dr. Carol Deppe. She is a plant breeder and author who has written useful resources for farmers and home gardeners. Dr. Deppe has developed many new seed varieties, serves on the board of the Open Source Seed Initiative, and is the founder of Fertile Valley Seeds. She describes her work as ensuring “sustainable agriculture and human survival for the next thousand years.” When we started farming we loved reading The Resilient Gardener and Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. Seed sovereignty is an important aspect of feeding our communities, and she provides excellent information on how to grow, save, select, and breed plants for production and consumption. Early in our farming career we thought we would do significantly more seed saving, but as we dove in, we quickly learned that growing vegetables to eat and growing vegetables for seed production are two completely different production methods, and we’re thankful for the high quality seed breeders, growers, and companies that sell seeds. (Though most seed companies contract with production growers to produce seeds for specific crops that they offer. In fact, our friends over at Muddy Fingers Farm who we highlighted a few weeks ago are seed producers for several seed companies. A real inspiration, and potentially a fun addition to this operation when our kids are in school full time.)

Have a great week!

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

peeking into the tunnels, photo by Adam Ford

Weekly Recipe

We’re working on creating a recipe index on this site so that you can easily search and browse the recipes that we share. Eventually all the historical recipes will be there, and here on out the new recipes will appear there. Here is a link to this week’s featured recipe for “Beet Jerky.”

Get The Recipe