This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: spinach, baby lettuce, rainbow chard, head lettuce, pea shoots, arugula, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches
Roots: salad turnips, daikon radish, fresh red beets with greens, fresh yellow beets with greens
Alliums: scallions, chives, mini green onions
Herbs: cilantro, sage, thyme
Fruiting crops: sugar snap peas, frozen heirloom and beefsteak tomatoes, Painted Mountain grain corn
Miscellaneous: rhubarb, broccolini

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

Farm News

It’s been hot! Which makes the plants grow, but also the farmers wilt. The team powered through some hot days this week doing hard stuff for the heat: spreading itchy straw mulch, weeding, trellising in the very hot high tunnels, etc… Thank you team!

There are probably other things to write about in this week’s newsletter but on Thursday this week we finally said goodbye to our sweet dog, Callie, and it’s still very weird that she’s not earthside with us anymore. Her estimated age when we adopted her was 8 months old, so we think she would have turned 15 in July, so our family is lucky to have had so much time with her. This spring her dementia symptoms continued to progress, and she was physically slowing down. The past couple weeks it was clear she was entering the end of life stage, and we were using a lot of our brain and heart space to stay attuned to her, keep her comfy and at ease, and spend lots of cuddling time with her, letting her know how grateful we have been for her space in our family, that it was ok to let go after almost 15 years here…. and letting her eat all the pepperoni of her dreams. She stayed relaxed and seemingly happy on our porch and in the backyard for the last few days, even wagged her tail at me when I sat down to be with her minutes before she died. It was just about the nicest animal death you can ask for, and it still really sucks.

Callie joined our family on March 30th, 2012, through a rescue that brings adoptable dogs from the Midwest and the Southeast to the Northeast. We decided to adopt a second dog after our first dog, Echo, was noticeably stressed after our evacuation from the first farm during Tropical Storm Irene. We saw that he was a more relaxed, happy, playful dog when other dogs would visit the farm, so we decided we needed to find another dog for our family, so he could be his pre-storm self all the time. We told the rescue that we connected with that we weren’t terribly picky, but should avoid beagle mixes, because we needed a dog who would hang around with us on the farm and not wander away. We were told she was a “Collie Mix.” We never did the DNA testing, but Callie was probably a full hound mix, maybe some beagle, maybe some bluetick coon hound, who knows, but either way, she was 100% a wanderer, and her many adventures through the woods and around the neighborhood were something we constantly had to manage. We always said that if she wasn’t so stinkin’ cute and sweet, we wouldn’t have been able to keep her. But besides having the softest ears and being a professional snuggler, both dogs also helped keep our mammal pressures at the farm at bay. I think their scent wandering the fields have kept our deer damage minimal, and many times over the years we watched both of these sweet dogs turn to vicious killers when a groundhog made itself known. They also had a lot of fun snacking on field rodents. So Callie was both a cherished family member and a working field dog, and all of her roles here will be missed. (And even though I know the photo dump below is predominately for my own heart, and maybe a superfluous addition to a weekly veggie CSA newsletter, feel free to enjoy some pics of Callie if you also have the predisposition to fall in love with dogs.)

In honor of Callie this week, consider smelling something interesting and then running for miles without telling the people who love you where you are going to find that smell, and then maybe come back that evening, or end up at the humane society, either way, look very cute when you make it home,

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

Green Onion Dip

Great for an appetizer, or spread on a sandwich… (Have some leftover? Throw up to a cup’s worth into your next quiche recipe.)