10th Week of the Summer CSA Season: July 29th

Jul 26

Written By Evening Song Farm

*head lettuce and fennel, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, pea shoots, bok choi, green curly kale, lacinato kale, rainbow chard, frilly head lettuce, green cabbage, caraflex cabbage
Roots: red beets, yellow beets, carrot bunches, salad turnips, red radish
Alliums: garlic, garlic scapes, loose yellow onions, fresh sweet onions, scallions
Herbs: parsley, basil, mint, sage
Miscellaneous: Rhubarb, celery, fennel
Fruiting crops: slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, green zucchini, yellow summer squash

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

*Adam took a bunch of super fun aerial pics with his drone this week, more below… this one captuers most of the veggie fields, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

We had a great week for farmwork this week: a final trellis on the cherry tomato plants, lots of straw mulched between ridges of our fields of fall root crops, lots of touch-up weeding on fields, and Cindy even started the repairs on our tractor shed. Our veggie fields look better than ever this summer. This next week will be our big garlic harvest: about 7,000 bulbs that we’ll pull from the field and bring to the propagation house to dry and cure. It won’t be long until we harvest our spring planted onions as well. This week we’ll begin harvesting fresh bunched sweet onions in addition to the loose yellow onions that we’ve had for a few weeks now. Soon we’ll have some red onions and shallots to add to allium assortment.

Other new vegetables this week are fennel, celery, mint, and sage, along with some beautiful red radishes that are back after a little break. While we’ll have a few tomatoes available at the barn, it looks like it will be one more week until tomatoes become more widely abundant. Way back in February, our little tomato seedlings became stressed under grow lights, and while they recovered well, it set back their flower development about two weeks. While we usually have a nice tomato harvest by now, it’ll be another week until they really come in. Next year we’ll put some extra energy into managing those tender seedlings during the February snows.

The other vegetable struggle we are dealing with is the ravaging of the eggplant and potato plants by the potato beetle: despite row cover and insect exclusion netting, those little buggers have been worse this year than usual. Many of our eggplants are skeletonized down to the stems. And it’s unclear how many potatoes we will be able to dig this week from the damage on those plants. It’s discouraging to deal with tenacious pests when we otherwise have such beautiful healthy plants.

But it’s been fun to see folks picking flowers from the flower garden: the yellows and oranges of sunflowers, rudbeckia, and calendula are especially vibrant right now. Here’s hoping for a nice gentle rain to bring some water into the soil.

Have a great week,

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

Tzatziki