14th Week of the Winter/Spring CSA season: Week of May 18th

May 14

Sign Up For The Summer CSA Season

The Summer CSA Season is right around the corner! If you want to participate in that season, and haven’t already signed up, do that now. If you aren’t sure if you are signed up for that season, just reach out, and we can let you know, or sign you up if that’s easier.

*barn field from the cupola, photo by Adam Ford*

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have fresh red radish bunches, red beets, orange carrots (Juniper Hill), rainbow carrots (Juniper Hill), red and yellow onions (Juniper Hill), mesclun mix, arugula, baby kale, baby lettuce, baby bok choi, pea shoots, and frozen heirloom/beefsteak tomatoes.

This week we will have basil 4-packs available as CSA items. (Basil is frost sensitive… in fact, it really doesn’t want to get colder than 40 degrees. So if you take one of these items now, keep it inside until the risk of frost has passed.)

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag

Ordering closes at noon on Tuesdays for Wednesday bags, and at midnight on Wednesday for Friday bags.

You do not need to fill out the form if you plan to come to the barn on Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

*Katie and Taylor trellising tomatoes, photo by Adam Ford*

*K2 lowering trellis strings for tomatoes, photo by Adam Ford*

the trellis strings are wrapped on rollers that are clipped to heavy duty wires that run the length of the high tunnel… as plants continue growing throughout the season, we are able to easily lower the plant, so the harvested parts lay on the ground, and we can more easily reach the new ripening fruit for harvesting, photo by Adam Ford

all this reaching up is like farmer yoga…. years ago I attended a workshop at a farming conference called “farming past 60” and the presenter claimed that if we pause and reach up for 2 minutes for every hour of farm work, that our bodies will let us farm for a long time… pulling down trellis strings builds in that motion! photo by Adam Ford

*cilantro, cukes, and romaine…all coming soon! photo by Adam Ford*

*hard to believe these will be out of control plants soon, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week was hot and sunny and the team worked hard to get a lot done. We trellised the first 5 rows of tomatoes in the Trunchbull…now the space feels very well cared for. The cucumbers and tomato plants are looking *really* good! This week we actually didn’t do much planting, but we did a lot of preparation to get ready for a major planting next week: zucchinis, peppers, onions, tomatoes, basil, parsley, and beets are all ready to go out. The hot sunny days and steady dry wind of this past week is much better weather for killing plants than for transplanting tender seedlings. We prioritized field preparation to kill any perennial weeds and set up our fields to make them easy to manage well through the summer. Next week’s weather looks much better for transplanting, and it will be exciting to get so many plants in the ground.

Removing rocks from our fields was a big task this week. This is always hard and heavy work to do in the hot sun, but it’s also incredible to see how much of a difference it makes over the years. Our cropland is divided into 37 fields, each about 1/10 acre, that are separated by grassy swales. This makes it so that it feels like we are tending to lots of little gardens, and it’s so much easier to work in those gardens when they are free of large and medium sized rocks. (The grassy swales also serve the essential function of slowly moving water around the growing spaces and minimizing erosion.) Even though rock removal is demanding work on the body there’s something wonderfully simple and satisfying about managing rocks in our field compared to managing weeds. Weed control involves biological systems and reproduction, across many different species that all behave differently…I’ll keep learning about how to manage weeds for as long as I live! But once you remover a rock from a field, it’s almost a permanent change: there are no more rock seeds, rhizomes, tubers, bulbs, corms, or vegetative shoots to make new rocks! (Freeze and thaw cycles as well as the few times we run a chisel plow both move a very small amount of rocks up toward the surface, but it’s nothing like managing the relentless repetition of weeds.) I love learning about the biology of all the different species of weeds on our farm to better manage weeds, and I also delight in the pure simplicity of removing a rock from a field.

So many great pics from our neighbor Adam, that below is a lovely photo tour of the week.

Hope you all have a lovely week,

-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, Galen, K2, Molly, Cindy, Taylor, Vanessa, and Katie

Arugula and Radish Frittata