9th Week of the Spring CSA season: Week of April 26th

Apr 21

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have spinach, green curly kale, scallions, flowering kale “raab,” baby kale, baby chard, baby lettuce, pea shoots, parsley, red beets, chioggia beets, carrots, onions, daikon radishes, watermelon radish, kohlrabi, and yellow potatoes.

Flowering kale “raab” is a delicious, fun, spring treat. We harvest the tender shoots, flowers, and leaves of the kale plants right before they go to flower as they put energy into setting seed. We cook with them like broccoli raab. A simple way to enjoy them as a side dish is sautéed with butter, garlic, a bit of lemon juice and salt… so good!

*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

*second round of tomatoes, photo by Adam Ford*

*old tokyo bekana survived in the new baby arugula, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

Woowee! School spring break for a farming mom is full! (And it’s also a daunting little reminder of how wild summer break is to juggle kids and work, ha.) Meanwhile, Ryan and the team worked hard at keeping up with the springtime wildness on the farm. The prop house continues to get packed with new seedlings. They got a good jump on setting the first round of cucumbers out in the tunnel. Next week we will put in the earliest tomatoes, and a few more cucumbers. Cucumbers! Those are my favorite. I know it’s much more reasonable to anticipate those first divine tomatoes, but cucumbers are my early summer delight… These perfect hand sized snacks, all the cucumber lemonade of my dreams, and crunchy, fresh pickles. When we plant them in the ground, all that feels like it’s a little bit closer.

The new pellet stove that provides backup heat in our prop house has been a great addition to the farm, keeping the tender plants more consistently warm. But it also is a bit finicky, and takes some fiddling each time we start it up. And Ryan noted the other evening why he gets now why heating propagation houses with fossil fuels is so ubiquitous…. It’s so nice to just flip a switch. But it feels right to do it this way, so the extra work is ok.

Next week will see a truly big planting of seeds… it’s the last round of seed starting for all the pre-ordered plants that folks ordered this year. The propagation house already seems full, but I suppose we will have more room for new seedlings once we get all those tomatoes and cucumbers tucked into the tunnels.

Ryan and Katie continue to get outdoor weekly seedings into some of the earliest beds, and within a few weeks, we will be harvesting the first round of greens from outside already.

Have a great week,

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