*What an abundance of flowers! Photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, bok choi, green curly kale bunches, rainbow chard, green cabbage, caraflex cabbage, green head lettuce, romaine head lettuce
Roots: new red potatoes, new yellow potatoes, salad turnips, red beet bunches, yellow beet bunches
Alliums: scallions, chives, onions, garlic scapes, fresh garlic bulbs
Herbs: sage, parsley, basil tops
Fruiting crops: zucchini, summer squash, slicing cucumbers, green beans, slicing tomatoes, cherry tomatoes
Miscellaneous: rhubarb, broccolini, fennel, celery

Crop Report

There should be plenty of tomatoes this week…we hope you enjoy all the different varieties. The white tomato, Sart Roloise, is especially nice textured and flavored. Baby lettuce is still excellent. Celery is the new item being harvested from the high tunnels this week…I expect it will be really nice. We keep the tops on the celery because they are wonderful to use, whether finely chopped and sauteed with onions and garlic at the beginning of a recipe, or finely chopped as a fresh finishing flavor like parsley. For those who were able to pick some berries from the farm last week, we aren’t expecting more availability this week: the robins are likely to pick off the remaining blueberries as they ripen, but we’ll put up a sign in the barn if we’re pleasantly surprised with more ripe berries on the bushes. One of our fall projects will be building a structure to put some netting over the blueberries. (In the meantime, check our Sugar Hill Blueberry Farm in East Wallingford if you’re looking for pick-your-own blueberries.)

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

*Looking down the open field, photo by Ryan*

Farm News

This week our team did the final round of trellising on the high tunnel tomato plants, which is always a relief. From early June through late July, it is a big job to go through all of our tomato plants, removing the extra leaders (or suckers, as they’re often called), removing the lower leaves off of the plants, and clipping the growing tip of the plant to a string. Between the slicing tomatoes, romas, and cherry tomatoes, we have a total of 1664 tomato vines to prune and trellis, which we need to do about 4 times between planting and when the plants reach the top of the string. Needless to say, it is a lot of work to do in this busy summer season! So it always feels great when we finish the trellising of the tomatoes, which frees up time for the upcoming large harvests of garlic, spring planted onions, and tomatoes. We’ll also get to catch up on some of the mulching and weed management that we would have loved to have done in the last couple weeks….when we were busy trellising our tomatoes.

Meanwhile, we were lucky to sneak away for a long beach weekend while the team held down the end of the week. We are always so grateful to having such a solid long term team that can do such a good job holding all the details together. Thanks, team! Short newsletter this week, because our kiddos are telling us they are ready to get back to the beach!

Have a great week,

-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, K2, Vanessa, Taylor, Katie, Galen, Leah, Natalie, Cindy, Georgia, Amelia, and Hannah (and S.ky and Soraya)

Fake-A-Mole

This is a super fun recipe to make in the summer, especially if you like to celebrate locally available ingredients. It’s definitely not an avocado based guac, but it’s a surprisingly delicious non-avocado based guacamole for our northern latitudes!