*field of leeks and parsnips, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, green curly kale bunches, rainbow chard, green head lettuce, pea shoots, fairy cabbage* (read description below in the crop report to learn about fairy cabbage)
Roots: new red potatoes, new yellow potatoes, salad turnips, red beet bunches, yellow beet bunches
Alliums: scallions, chives, yellow onions, red onions, sweet 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

First a haiku for the cherry tomatoes:

I spend long winters
Ordering seeds and planting.
Anticipation.

Cotyledons grow
Repot. Repot. Off you go.
Climbing high for months.

May and April- wait.
June is far too soon. Ok.
But July?! Come on!

I am fooled again
You blush but stall on the vine
Will you ever fruit?

Sorry for our incorrect prediction on the cherry tomato arrival last week. We will stop trying to predict them. The slicing and roma tomatoes are rolling though, so they will continue to be available without a limit. (And at some point our 312 cherry tomato plants will be overflowing. Maybe my high quality haiku will inspire them to ripen.) Celery is beautiful and delicious. And even though we’ve been saying it weekly in the crop report, the baby lettuce is just awesome right now. It is abundant, so feel free to pick up extra bags for any friends, neighbors, or family who may be wary of industrially produced fresh leafy greens these days. This week will have some new onions: red and sweet. The sweet onions are Ailsa Craig, an old variety that really is exceptionally sweet carmelized, and also lovely sliced raw for sandwiches or salads. Carrots have been a noticeably absence these past few weeks…in the rainy weeks of May and early June, we saw three separate seedings of carrots get devoured by slugs...it’s the first time we’ve ever seen anything close to that level of damage to carrot seedlings, so lesson learned. Enough escaped the slug onslaught for us to enjoy a harvest for next week (week 12) and shortly after that we will get to enjoy an unlimited weekly abundance of carrots all through the end of the season as the later plantings of carrots (which did not get turned into slug food) mature.

What is fairy cabbage? After the main heads of cabbage are harvested, they send out side shoots that create these super cute little tiny cabbages that we used to bring to farmers’ markets eons ago because people LOVED them. They are somewhere between a giant brussels sprout and a tiny cabbaged, obviously taste like cabbage, maybe they are a little more tender? I don’t really know. Either way, they are fun, and perfect for a fairy feast.

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

*fields above the barn, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

We had a fun time sneaking away to the beach last weekend. In our first year farming as Evening Song Farm in 2011 we couldn’t fathom that’s it’s possible to leave a veggie farm in the summer, but we love that we can now. One souvenir that I (Kara) got to take home from the beach this year was a torn ACL! Fun times! The last morning there we had some big, rough waves, but our kids are mermaids, so I was in with them lifeguarding, and one wave was particularly interested in twisting me up in ways that my knee did not consent to. Anyway, now I am heavily modifying how I farm while I keep my knee stable and await a clear treatment and recovery plan. (I am just grateful I kept my ACLs intact in the early years of farming when we didn’t have a large enough crew to fill in my spaces when I have physical modifications to make with my work!)

This week we worked hard to get cover crops in on time in the fields that are done producing crops for the season, and we are catching up on some overdue thinning and weeding. (Though each individual weeding project is not too much on its own because some of our soil management practices have vastly improved our weed situation, but we still have to keep up on it all to maintain the lower weed seed bank that we have compared to years past.) The team got a lot of the fall harvested roots thinned… like parsnips, Gilfeather turnip, rutabaga, etc. And throughout it all, the team sends out copious volumes of fantastic veggies in all the directions these veggies find themselves traveling in our region.

Despite just sneaking away to the beach for a bit, we are also going to hit the road soon for another trip to the midwest again this summer. Last year we traveled out there to co-host our dear friend Dave’s memorial service, and this summer his wife and kiddos are hosting a gathering with his loved ones for his birthday. So we will pack our car with mostly vegetables to host some glorious feasts (because who wants store bought produce these day?! ah! I feel even luckier this summer to have this food!), and head out there with some stops along the way visiting other friends and family, and some swims in Great Lakes with hopefully tamer, less ACL-tearing waves than the ocean, ha!

Have a great week,

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

Cucumber Limeade

Finally, the volume of cucumbers we have now justifies some cucumber limeade!