*Cindy laying out drip irrigation lines in the cucumber/tomato jungle, 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, baby kale
Roots: salad turnips, 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 have a few more varieties listed this week, but for the widest variety, come to the barn to pick out your CSA items. Just a couple more weeks for the plants being available.

*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.

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

*Vanessa, K2, Natalie, Katie transplanting scallions, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

So many of the planting stragglers got in this week: the rest of the shallots, another round of broccolini, the rest of the brussels sprouts, all the pick your own flowers, and probably several others I am forgetting. We are staying ahead of the tomato trellising this year, which is a feat that doesn’t always occur. This particular month has an over abundance of tasks to nail in a timely way that generally something slides to the backburner and we deal with the consequences later. But this year, folks on the team are jumping in for extra work days beyond their normal schedule, just for June so we don’t have to accept down stream July and August chaos. So right now tomatoes and cukes are all on their strings, most weeds have been put in their place, direct seedings have been happening on time, fields prepped for cover cropping and fall cropping, and everything has been transplanted in a timely way. Not trying to brag or prematurely count my chickens, but I am grateful the team was into trying out this new “let’s all work a little bit more in June” flex to see how we like it… so far, so good.

As I am sure many of us feel these days, it’s increasingly hard to be a human with a heart in the world at this moment in time. I try to remind myself that we started this farm project as a way to address our need to be a puzzle piece in a different future, an essential alternative to the track the world is on. Sometimes when I walk around our fields, and have the capacity to notice the thriving insects and birds (and even the well fed chipmunks who mow down seedlings in the prop house!), I have a nagging concern that my work isn’t doing enough to help make a tiny course correction for our collective trajectory. But I try to connect with the reality that the best we can all do is just use whatever unique skills and gifts we each have to bring about something new. So thank you for being a part of the CSA community that allows us to have an outlet for our inclination to grow food for our community in a way that centers the earth.

Have a great week!

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

We make a little batch of this in the spring to use throughout the summer grilling season!

Rhubarb Chutney