I am enjoying all the photos of pollinator food. Pollinators are obviously essential to our work. We used to keep honey bee hives right here on the farm for almost a decade. Ryan’s dad is a master bee keeper, and set us up when we started farming, and then essentially helped us maintain them well along the way. The last couple of years we had hives, we started having regular bear problems, and couldn’t keep the bear from damaging the hives even with a hot electric fence around the hives. We finally had Ryan’s dad re-home those hives back to his house, where they are better attended to, without our resident bear bothering them. So we rely on the native pollinators, and our neighbors many, many hives down the hill who I am sure forage up here. This week, we found a fun surprise of a small number of a solitary bee species making a home immediately next to our front door. It makes it a little congested to go in and out of the door with bees flying around, but since our family is lucky to not have any life threatening bee allergies that we know of, we rather enjoy our new neighbors. It feels like an honor that they chose our entrance to make a home on. Photo by Adam Ford

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have carrots, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, fingerling potatoes, spinach, baby lettuce, mesclun mix, spicy salad mix, scallions, pea shoots, radishes, baby bok choi, salad turnips, arugula, cilantro, baby kale, rhubarb, and head lettuce (red, green, and mini-romaine).

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

Summer CSA Signup

This is the LAST WEEK of the spring CSA share. If you want to do the summer share, and haven’t signed up yet, sign up here. We will likely hit our membership limit in the next few days, so if you click there and it says it is a waitlist, but you are a current CSA member, don’t worry: still sign up, and I’ll move you off the wait list to be a part of the summer CSA season. I always turn it into a wait list a little bit early to make sure I have space for every current CSA member.

Summer CSA Details

Farm News from Kara

(Optional bonus reading)

Thank you, everyone, for joining our spring CSA season! We are so lucky to have so many enthusiastic families and people who commit to each season with these veggies. Thanks. If you take the summer off because you have your own garden, have a lovely season. (And if you want to stay on our email list, still “sign up” for a summer CSA share, but then make a note in the comments that you aren’t actually doing the summer share, just keeping your email on the weekly newsletter list.)

This week, or for the next few weeks, my brain is completely wrapped around plant sales that go into everyone else’s garden. We send out pre-ordered plants, display live plants in the barn as items for CSA pickup, and we do live plant sales through our website. So there is a lot to organize, count, nurture, label, arrange, and send out. I have too much work on my plate, but this project brings me most of the joy I experience with all the different things we do with this farm. We came to farming as avid gardeners ourselves, and we just like vicariously connecting with that hobby by starting so many people’s plants each season. And here is something funny… I am pretty bad at keeping a home garden now that we farm. I know that sounds ridiculous… “But you have 5 acres of veggies in your back yard, you don’t NEED a garden…” That sentiment is pretty accurate, but we also love having fresh items right outside the door, plenty of the most exciting items, like snap peas and cherry tomatoes, for our kids to pick without trampling what we need for CSA, and even trying some things that we don’t grow commercially. When we do make time and space for our gardening hobby, it’s generally the experimental stomping ground for items we may eventually incorporate into our commercial production. Such as last season when we finally tried growing melons for CSA. We only gave that a whirl after some seasons of trying out different melons for ourselves.

Last week the team transplanted all the pepper plants. All 1,600 of them. This is a bit earlier than we usually put them out, but we went for it, and they will be row covered to protect them and help them get a jump on the season. They also finished transplanting the shallots, and got the earliest round of tomatoes trellised. Those wild plants grow incredibly fast, so it’s essential we stay on top of them so they don’t get too out of control! The team also seeded 90 trays (about 7,000 plants) of fall brassicas, like storage cabbages. This week we will continue to get transplants in the ground, and probably trellis the earliest cucumber planting.

Have a great week!

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

Weekly Recipe: Roasted Radishes and Salad Turnips