*Ryan thinking out tomato variety lay out, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have spinach, green curly kale, scallions, flowering kale “raab,” baby chard, baby lettuce, baby arugula, 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

Farm News

Last week was such a productive week: We got all the earliest tomatoes planted in the tunnel with baby head lettuce, cilantro, scallions, and beets transplanted around them. (When those faster growing outer crops are harvest out, then we lay landscape fabric between all the tomato rows to keep weeds down.) We also planted all the earliest cucumbers, and started the process of replacing them as they get nipped off by rodents. (When we transplant cucumbers, we lay lots of traps among the plants because the sweet, tender, fresh cucumber stems are such a temptation for critters to munch down. And despite all the trapping, there are always some plants that get munched, ugh. But we start lots of extra cucumber plants to keep replacing the ones we lose.) The team got a jump on some outdoor transplanting of beets and brassicas, and they seeded the outdoor peas and the first round of potatoes!

Bryan, Cindy, and Ryan got some new, fine, mesh netting up on the sides of the first tunnel. Our cucumber plants usually suffer in quality and yield due to cucumber beetle pressure. Our mentality in managing pests is to generally do our best to keep their population low, but we don’t preventatively spray things to keep it that way. So exclusion is our best option to avoid spraying the plants, even with an organic pesticide. Usually we have just let the cucumber beetles be, but it really seems like we can grow better fruit if we make a bigger effort at exclusion. So this year, we finally invested in fine mesh to completely enclose the tunnel. We are excited to see how it does for us this year. Growers that use this strategy really appreciate its effectiveness of keeping the insects out of this growing space.

A lot of our work time this week was spent seeding and repotting the thousands of little plants we are starting for all the plant pre-orders. I am estimating that the space that all the pre-ordered plants are taking up in the propagation house right now is just shy of 30% of the growing space in there…. it just gets me so excited to look at all those plants bound for other great gardens. Very cool. And now we are playing catch up on potting up a bunch of plants for the farm… celery, parsley, peppers, husk cherries, later tomato rounds, all need to be potted up for more individual growing space while they wait to be transplanted out.

Next week we will continue to seed plant pre-orders, and we will start many more of the outdoor transplanting of the earliest veggies. And my little brother and I will share a birthday together on Wednesday. (We have the same birthday— we are not twins, just celestial twins 4 years apart— and growing up, I loved to share a birthday celebration. I have missed that with him living in Colombia for so long, so it will be a family treat to share our day again.)

Have a great week,

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