*The head lettuce this week is a beautiful crunchy head, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, pea shoots, arugula, rainbow chard, green frilly head lettuce, green curly kale
Roots: red radishes, potatoes, beets, carrots, rutabaga, sweet potato
Miscellaneous: Rhubarb, asparagus
Plant starts: tomatoes, peppers, flowers, herbs, and veggies

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

*tomato plants are thriving, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week our team had a great week setting out lots of transplants: peppers, ground cherries, tomatillos, eggplant, and another round of head lettuce. We also trellised all of our second tomato planting, weeded a few crops in the high tunnels and outdoors, set up the netting for trellising outdoor sugarsnap peas, and seeded half of our winter squash and grain corn, in addition to the weekly mulch and compost application to our fields. It’s amazing how much work we can get done in a week with so many experienced folks making it happen.

Once more we are continuing to bring in some vegetables from Juniper Hill Farm, a certified organic farm on Lake Champlain who has supplied some of our farm’s winter storage vegetables, beyond what we grow here. This week will have asparagus, sweet potatoes, storage potatoes, storage carrots, and kale from Juniper Hill farm to supplement the greens that our farm is harvesting now. I think this is the first year that our farm has needed to supplement our production in early June, and as a veggie farmer it can be disappointing and stressful to see when we didn’t grow everything that we could have to fill out the harvest in the early season. The extensive wet weather of the past few weeks has been an added challenge. So, we’re taking good records to be able to adapt for next year to be able to harvest more crops in larger volumes in late May and early June. A farm like ours is so incredibly diverse…dozens of crops that we grow, many with multiple seeding dates, with the goal of being able to have a wide variety of crops available to harvest every week. While it’s a bummer (and surprising to us!) to not have quite enough growing here to harvest this early season, we are grateful to be able to tap into our network of local farms to supplement during crunch times when our harvest is lean.

Otherwise, the crops in the ground look really promising for upcoming weeks, and we’re especially excited for the spring carrots, fresh beets, cucumbers, and sugarsnap peas that are getting ready to harvest. It’s still wet but summer is coming!

Quick shout out to Ryan’s mom who has been the “bread and hummus fairy” — bringing up all the fun Earth Sky Time Farm goodies in the extra purchases area in the barn. If it weren’t for her doing the pickup for us, we wouldn’t be enjoying the best veggie burgers ever!

Unrelated to vegetable production, it’s time for me to scale back my dairy goat hobby back to the tiny size herd that serves our goat needs best. In case anyone is interested, we will be selling two of our goats: Noel and Sophie. Noel is an Alpine/Nigerian Dwarf cross and is pregnant with two kids at the moment, due in about a month. She’s an excellent milker, but appreciates tall fences. Sophie is her 1-year-old kid, and will likely be a great milker once she is old enough to breed. Reach out to learn more about them if you want to start or expand your goat herd!

Have a great week,

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

Maple Mustard Tahini Salad Dressing