This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: green curly kale, kale rapini, spinach, baby lettuce, baby chard, arugula, pea shoots, spicy mix
Roots: fresh red radishes, red beets, yellow beets, large carrots*, watermelon radish, yellow potatoes, daikon radish, Gilfeather turnip, parsnips**
Alliums: scallions, green garlic
Herbs: parsley
Fruiting crops: frozen heirloom and beefsteak tomatoes, Painted Mountain grain corn

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

*these zucchini babies will get transplanted out soon!, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

It was a great week: transplanting lettuce, kale, chard, and parsley outdoors; planting the earliest potatoes; seeding sugarsnap peas; planting trays of flowers in the greenhouse for the flower garden; potting up tomato plants in the greenhouse for many people’s gardens; and so many beautiful fresh greens to harvest from the high tunnels. It doesn’t hurt that we still haven’t yet hit the high peak of our farm’s seasonal workload, so we still get to take Thursday and Friday afternoons off as a team. It’s physically demanding work to be on your feet—or crouching down—for many hours a day harvesting, planting, moving sandbags, spreading mulch, and so on. It’s good, as the work allows, to try to do it in a schedule that builds up rather than breaks down one’s body.

The new vegetable of the week is most definitely Green Garlic! Just as our stash of last years garlic bulbs has run out, we get to begin harvesting the growing shoots of garlic bulbs planted last fall. Last November, in one small section of a field predominantly planted to overwintering onions, we also planted a few hundred smaller garlic bulbs at close spacing: no breaking up the garlic into individual cloves, just the whole bulb stuck into the soil. This spring the growing shoots of all that garlic come up with the spring vigor that every grower of garlic knows. These next 2-3 weeks are the perfect time to enjoy this form of the versatile garlic plant: by late May the plants become a bit too tough and we have to wait until garlic scape season in late June to enjoy a form of garlic again.

If you’re new to green garlic (but good at analogies), scallions are to onions as green garlic is to garlic cloves. It is tender and fresh like a scallion, and also like a scallion you can use every single part of the stems and leaves. (For the adventurous cooks, the roots can be rinsed and fried in oil, served hot with salt and pepper for a delicious and crispy garlicky treat.) The green garlic stems and leaves can be blended, roasted, grilled, sauteed, chopped fine and used fresh, and even fermented. Like garlic cloves, it has a spicy flavor when raw that mellows to a rich and deep garlic flavor when cooked.

What a time of the spring! I feel lucky to get to be around for another year of the maple leaves emerging and transforming our world so quickly.

Have a great week,

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

Daikon Dip

This week a friend asked me how I like to eat daikon. My preferred way to eat daikon is fermented: grated with fresh ginger and salt to create a fun addition to salads and wraps, or in a batch of kimchi. But then I remembered this recipe above, given to us by a CSA member a couple years ago. If you check out the recipe, you will see I improvised with additional cilantro, but I imagine you can do the same improvisation with parsley.