*It’s a joy to be back working in the tunnels on a sunny day! photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: green curly kale, spinach, mesclun mix, green cabbage
Roots: red beets, yellow beets, chioggia beets, carrots, watermelon radish, yellow potatoes, daikon radish, Gilfeather turnip, rutabaga, parsnips
Alliums: garlic, yellow onions, leeks, shallots
Fruiting crops: frozen heirloom and beefsteak tomatoes*, Painted Mountain grain corn

*When we hit the most booming week of tomato yields, we vacuum seal packages of whole tomatoes, and this time of year they are a delicious way to make a simple small batch of sauce or in other recipes that call for a stewed tomato.

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

*Once again, open for the season, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

It’s fun being back at harvest greens, smelling the soil, enjoying the warmth from the tunnels, and eating a salad! (I have to admit that I am kind of a lazy farmer when our CSA break hits… Even though the greens are sitting there tucked under layers of heavy row cover only 100 feet from my house, it can be such a project to crawl under there, harvest, wash, dry, just for a single salad that I often just groove on root veggies until the spring CSA season! So I share your excitement to enjoy these fresh greens again finally.)

Hundreds of tomatoes, peppers, perennial herbs, and some early flowers are sprouting and thriving with grow lights and heat mats in our attic. It makes much more sense in terms of energy consumption to use our house for the earliest trays, but this week we will get the grow room in the root cellar going because we have more trays to start, and these earliest plants are ready to be potted up into larger containers. Seed starting season is definitely my favorite time of year!

And then after a few weeks of filling and packing the grow room, then we will finally have to fire up the regular prop house to have enough room for all the plants. But until then, it’s fun to progressively fill smaller spaces.

We are excited to eventually harvest the parsnips that overwintered in their outdoor beds this year. The ones we have now were harvested in the fall and stored in the root cellar, but a spring harvested parsnip is exciting to pull. That won’t be until all the snow is gone and the ground has thawed, but with this week’s temperatures, it’s hard to imagine we will have much snow left after this week. Though we are still sneaking in skis in our woods while it’s still hanging around!

Have a great week,

-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, K2, Vanessa, Taylor, Katie, Cindy, and Hannah (and Sky and Soraya)

Gilfeather Turnip Mac and Cheese!

This winter I was making parsnip mac and cheese for my kids, and they LOVED it… I took an oversized parsnip or two, slow roasted them, added them to a cheesy mac and cheese sauce, and pureed the whole thing until it was smooth, and then used that for mac and cheese. It made a delightful, slightly sweet, creamy mac and cheese that was sneakily packed with fiber, folates, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, and potassium, thanks to the parsnips. Gilfeather turnips have a similar nutrient profile, and they are also the Vermont state vegetable! (I know, kinda niche and weird to have Gilfeather turnip as a state vegetable, but I guess California already called dibs on garlic as their state vegetable, and my home state of New Jersey lays claim to my other favorite vegetable: kale. So we have the Gilfeather turnip, and we ought to figure out all the ways to enjoy it, like this mac and cheese recipe!)