3rd Week of the Summer CSA Season: June 10th

Jun 7

*pollinators love the blooming cover crops, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, pea shoots, arugula, spinach, rainbow chard, green frilly head lettuce, bok choi, green curly kale
Roots: red radishes, potatoes, beets, carrots, rutabaga
Miscellaneous: Rhubarb
Fruiting crops: sugarsnap peas*
Plant starts: last week of a few random plants that are left

*We are so excited to be able to harvest sugarsnap peas this week! We think there will be enough for everyone throughout the whole week, but please list a preffered substitution in case the harvest isn’t as bountiful as it looks. If we do come up short, they will just keep putting out more and more in the weeks to come, so you will get them soon!

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

*“open field” from the tree stand, early spring greens, outdoor sugar snap peas, elderberries, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week we did a lot more planting, grateful for a few days of drier and sunnier weather. There were some exciting crops that we planted this week. Sweet potatoes were a new crop for us last year…we tried planting a single bed of sweet potatoes to see how they would do in mulched ridges. It was fun to harvest the beautiful tubers in the fall, so this year we’re growing four times as many. They’re a funny crop to plant, poking sad looking stems with wilty leaves in the soil. But soon they will send out roots and incredibly vigorous foliage.

Another fun planting this week was our pick-your-own flower garden right above the barn. This has been fun part of our farm ever since COVID changed our distribution in 2020, with many more people picking up veggies from our farm. On Friday before the rain we set out many hundred transplants of snapdragons, sunflowers, cosmos, zinnias, bachelor’s buttons, verbena, mexican sunflower, and many other cutting flowers for folks to pick in July and August.

We finished getting the winter squash and grain corn plots planted. The grain corns have been more of a hobby crop that we sneak in amidst the winter squash production, but our family has really loved using our homegrown corn for fresh tortillas, empanadas, grits, cornbread, waffles, and pancakes. We also continued to trellis and prune all the wildness of the cucumber and tomato plants.

We got to take a little trip over to Ryan’s dad and stepmother’s house this weekend over west of Saratoga Springs, New York, where Ryan grew up, and it’s always a delight to see their garden. Back when Ryan and I were just exploring our interest in growing food in college, I loved getting to visit and be inspired by such an expansive home garden, a field of blueberry bushes, and bustling bee hives. So every time I get to see it again, it feels like visiting some seeds of our early inspiration. There are little nuggets from his home that made its way into our farm: varieties of vegetables we learned from his dad (shoutout to the tetsukabuto squash!), locust saplings that are now sturdy young trees dropping their own blossoms in our yard, reclaimed barn boards for the cupboards in our kitchen, to name just a few. As first generation farmers, it’s a little gift to weave some of these family connections into a new space.

Have a great week,

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

Pea Shoot Risotto