This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: spinach, baby lettuce, rainbow chard, bok choi, mesclun mix
Roots: fresh red radishes, fresh salad turnips, red beets, watermelon radish, yellow potatoes*, daikon radish, parsnips
Alliums: scallions, green garlic
Herbs: parsley, cilantro
Fruiting crops: frozen heirloom and beefsteak tomatoes, Painted Mountain grain corn
Miscellaneous: rhubarb
some plants: We will list a few more plants than last week. We don’t list everything we start for sale because it’s too wide of a variety to keep an active inventory for the website. If you want to have access to the full array of seedlings, come to the barn on a Wednesday or Thursday to pick out plants in front of the barn.

*Potato Note: The rest of the storage potatoes are getting hard to sort through for zero blemishes on them. We will start to pack a larger amount of potatoes in the packed bags, and we invite you to take 2 pounds of potatoes at the barn if you pick up here, in hopes that this extra amount will account for any parts you have to cut off. While we prefer to be able to send out impeccable quality vegetables year-round, we also experience making the most of storage vegetables as part of our efforts to address the different ways we can address our climate impact. Most estimates have food waste as contributing 5%-10% towards global greenhouse gas emissions, so in our home, we scrounge every little bit of edible food by cutting off bad spots.

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

Community News

The friends and family of a longtime CSA member are hosting a karaoke night and silent auction on May 23rd from 5pm to 8pm at the Brandon Town Hall Theater to support her and her family during the grueling treament and life disruptions from head and neck cancer. If you are in the area and free that day, it will be fun for a great cause.

Farm News

There are many milestones that pass in a season of vegetable farming: this week’s milestone is all about spinach. Last September in our high tunnels, we pulled out the tomato and cucumber vines and seeded spinach in freshly prepared beds. We harvested the first cutting of that spinach last November/December, tucked in the plants underneath three layers of row cover for the deep winter, and then began harvesting again for CSA at the beginning of March. Now, a full ten weeks later, we are still harvesting the abundant offering of the overwintered spinach. So much about spinach is amazing to me: it’s cold tolerance, productivity, and how wonderfully nourishing it feels to eat fresh spinach cooked in any of the wonderful ways there are to enjoy it…soups, saag paneer, or our family’s go-to: sautee garlic in plenty of olive oil and then add spinach until it’s cooked. This week we will finally harvest the last of that overwintered spinach. One variety in particular grew into an interesting upright form as it’s getting ready to flower, When you cut the whole stalk of it, it looks a little like magical green tree from a fairy forest.

This week we will also harvest the first of the spring spinach, seeded outdoors in late March and covered with a row cover. It’s a treat to harvest from that field because we haven’t needed to do any weeding of those vegetables: they’re spaced closely, grow quickly, and we are beginning to experience the benefits of thoughtful and diligent management of our fields to maintain a low population of viable weed seeds in the soil.

Cilantro is back in abundance this week (hooray!), and it will also be the final week of parsley from our overwintered plants in the high tunnel before our outdoor spring planting will be ready to harvest in a few weeks. (Not a bad time to blend up some of that cilantro and parsley with green garlic to make a fresh chimichurri.) Salad turnips are the other new item we’re harvesting, from the edges of the cucumber beds in the high tunnel. They are definitely worth a try if you haven’t had them before. I like to peel off the slightly spicy skin (though it’s tender and some people enjoy it) and slice them. If you have kids, leave some peeled and sliced salad turnips in their vicinity, and it’s pretty likely that they’ll disappear. Otherwise I hope you’re enjoying all the fresh greens we’re harvesting now. It’s been a joy to be planting and harvesting!

Have a wonderful week,

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

Green Garlic Pesto