*harvesting greens, photo by Adam Ford. Tokyo bekana is the light green bed that Galen is harvesting.*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, spinach, green curly kale, lacinato kale bunches, bok choi, tokyo bekana*, green cabbage, mesclun mix, mini head lettuce, and claytonia**
Roots: carrots, parsnips, yellow potatoes, rutabaga, red beets, chioggia beets, watermelon radish, daikon radish, and Gilfeather turnip
Alliums: garlic, shallots, and leeks
Herbs and Miscellaneous: parsley and cilantro

*What is tokyo bekana? Great question! It’s the tender, mild, bright green leaf in the mesclun mix, and we use it like a baby lettuce. If you enjoy mild lettuce greens, you would probably enjoy this green as well. Wonderful on it’s own, or mixed in a salad with the greens. It’s technically a variety of Chinese cabbage that was bread for smaller, tender, mild fresh eating.

**What is claytonia? Some folks call it “miner’s lettuce,” and it is a tender, small, smooth green leaf with leggy, crunchy stems. It’s great in salads, and also on sandwiches and wraps. Our kids just eat it plain in handfuls with as much vigor as a potato chip session. (Which is inspiring, but they are more advanced than me… I am not as eager to have it plain, ha!) I am normally not someone who likes the stems of greens, but I really like the textural addition of these delicious succulent stems within the mix of the greens. If claytonia is new to you, and you enjoy greens, I encourage you to give it a shot at some point.

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

*parsnips in the display cooler, photo by Adam Ford*

Details for the Last 3 Weeks of the Season

Just so you can plan your veggie access during the holiday weeks, here is a preview of when it will be available for the rest of the season:

This week is normal: The barn will be set up with veggies on Wednesday and Thursday, 9am to 8pm. Delivered bags will happen on Wednesday and Friday.

Week of the 23rd: The barn will be set up with veggies Monday from noon to 8pm, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (T/W/Th: 9am to 8pm). All delivered bags will happen on Friday that week, none on Wednesday.
Week of the 30th: The barn will be set up with veggies Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (9am to 8pm). All delivered bags will happen on Friday that week, none on Wednesday.

Farm News

This week Ryan will head off to the New England Vegetable and Fruit Conference in New Hampshire to present on some of our low- and no- till methods. It’s one of the better technical conferences to connect with other produce growers about some of the nitty gritty aspects of production methods and soil management. Some of our soil health practices are not a ubiquitous tool in most vegetable farm tool kits, but this year was especially satisfying to see how many crops grew well with the new mulching systems we have been employing, so it’ll be fun for Ryan to share the results of some of these experiments with other growers.

Meanwhile the rest of us will hold down all the weekly harvest this week. This time of year we are harvesting over 400 pounds of greens from the tunnels each week, which really impresses me, even this many years at it… That with less than 1/3 of an acre (13,320 square feet) of high tunnel growing space, that we are able to harvest that many hundreds of pounds of fresh greens each week during the indoor growing season. Plants are so bountiful and generous.

For the past month, I have been trying to find a few minutes to sit quietly somewhere on the farm. This week when I was sitting in the high tunnel among the greens, on a cloudy afternoon that felt so flat and somewhat dismal, I was keenly aware of the efficiency of the plants around me… that through the grayness, they were still accessing the sunshine into their cells and photosynthesizing that clouded sunlight into life and energy. May we be as attuned as our plant friends to the light around us, no matter how dim it feels.

Have a great week,

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

Fresh Spring Rolls