2nd Week of the Summer CSA Season: Week of June 2nd

May 29

*tomatillo jungle before transplanting, Photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: spinach, baby lettuce, rainbow chard, bok choi, mini romaine head lettuce, green leaf head lettuce, pea shoots, arugula
Roots: fresh red radishes, salad turnips, red beets, yellow potatoes*, daikon radish, parsnips**
Alliums: scallions, chives
Herbs: cilantro, sage, thyme
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 for delivery. This is also the last week we will have plants outside the barn, so use this week to finish picking what you want, and feel free to tell/bring your friends neighbors who may still need garden plants.

*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.

** The parsnips have surface damage from carrot rust fly larvae. There’s still a lot of good parsnip left after peeling or cutting off those areas. We are packing a larger amount of parsnips for items to account for that extra work.

***We vacuum seal the surplus tomatoes in the summer, and they are great for soups, stews, and chilis this way. We have a few bags left!

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

*sugarsnap peas climbing their trellis, scallions and peppers growing alongside, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This is the last week we will have seedlings available outside the barn. There are a few more varieties out there this week after we finished planting what we needed for the farm fields and finished sending out the pre-order plants. Feel free to let your friends and neighbors who may still be looking for plants… non-CSA members are welcome to come check out the plants we have available.

This week we did a lot of transplanting: We got the husk cherries, tomatillos, eggplant, sweet peppers, hot peppers, basil, brussels sprouts, winter squash, ginger, and some replacement plants all tucked into their spots in the fields in mostly heavily mulched beds to manage weeds for the season. We got all the tunnel cucumber plants trellised and started tackling the first row of tomato trellising. (We hope to tame that tomato chaos next week!) The cucumber plants have perplexed us a bit this spring… We transplanted stunning cucumber seedlings into fabulous tunnel soil with meticulous bed prep, and timed watering, in an insect screened tunnel. And for some reason, most of the plants decided to languish and look a little peeved that they had to be bothered by moving from their cell trays into the ground. We have had to replace many of them with new plants, and now some of them look like they are finally taking off, but it may be a little bit longer before we are harvesting the first cucumber fruits. (My barometer for how the cucumber plants are doing from year to year is if we get to harvest the first cucumber for Katie’s birthday in early June, and it’s looking like that may be an elusive birthday gift this year.)

We tucked the field eggplants under insect exclusion netting because that is our only hope to give them a chance against potato beetles that routinely defoliate those plants. Even if we wanted to rely on organic sprays to control pests, there aren’t any suitable organic insecticides for potato beetles because they have effectively developed resistance to the sprays that organic farmers have access to for their control. Last year they snuck under the insect netting in the field and really ravaged the plants. This year, I hope to find time in a couple weeks to get under there with a tennis racket and a bucket of soapy water. Long ago at the first commercial farm I worked at, that farmer’s method for managing potato beetles was to walk down the rows, gently tapping each of the plants with the racket, while holding the bucket of soapy water below the plants to collect the beetles as they get knocked off the plant. It doesn’t eliminate them, but it does greatly reduce the population to give the plants a fighting chance at outgrowing their damage. Eggplant is one of my favorite summer veggies to cook with, so I get especially irked at those little bugs for ruining my dreams of freezing trays of eggplant parmesan for the winter.

Next week we will try to get the pick-your-own flower garden planted, as well as a few small straggler plantings that are patiently waiting in the prop house. Meanwhile the prop house is rapidly emptying out, as we get the fields planted and get everyone’s seedlings to their home gardens.

Have a great week!

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

Just made this recipe below with salad turnips, both the roots and the greens. It’s quick and delicious and can be made with any spring veggie!

Roasted Veggie Ricotta Puff Pastry