4th Week of the Summer CSA Season: June 17th

Jun 13

Written By Evening Song Farm

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, pea shoots, arugula, spinach, rainbow chard, green frilly head lettuce, mini romaine head lettuce, bok choi, green curly kale, lacinato kale, parsley
Roots: potatoes, fresh beet bunches with greens, carrots, rutabaga
Alliums: fresh baby onion bunches*
Miscellaneous: Rhubarb
Fruiting crops: sugarsnap peas, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers
*Baby onion bunches are golf-ball sized onions or smaller with nice greens that can be used fresh or cooked… Think of these as gorgeous scallions with large white bulbs.

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

*the spring beets and carrots are almost ready, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week we planted a whole field of potatoes, planted flowers for pollinator habitat all around our fields, continued trellising tomatoes and cucumbers, and prepared different cover crop fields for later crops.

I love pruning and trellising tomatoes. I love everything about it. I love taking these wild vines and trimming them up to create order within boundless nightshade growth. I love removing the lower leaves to improve airflow, imagining how I am (hopefully) preventing the onset of disease pathogens taking over in the foliage. I love looking at the progression of flowers and tiny fruits as I move up the plant. I love the pasty, dark green resin that smells of summer that coats my hands and requires a gritty soap to remove after pruning rows of tomatoes. And I love seeing this particular task as a hallmark of being a veggie farmer. So much of agriculture is manipulating the natural environment to produce a certain outcome that we have culturally decided over generations is how we want to eat food. The wild ancestors of tomatoes don’t look much like the highly cultivated varieties production vegetable farms rely on these days (check out Tomatoland for an engaging read on tomato history), but their wildness has persisted through generations of breeding and selecting for humans’ desired qualities… because even the most selectively bred varieties, if left alone, and not pruned and trellised regularly, would grow as a sprawling, vining mess of foliage that hides its fruit. Outside of my role as a farmer, I want to pretty much leave the natural world alone (check out How To Love A Forest, by Vermont forester Ethan Tapper, for a nice read of the nuanced role of hands off and hands on approaches to engaging with the natural world), but farming has nothing to do with leaving things alone, and cultivating tomato plants are one of the most attended to plants we manage. And when I am in there making these plants grow the way I want them to, I can practically taste the future of tomato basil sandwiches, tomato sauce, salsa, masalas, and dried tomatoes. But I am getting a little ahead of my tomato fantasies at the moment, since we still have over a month to go before they are ready!

Something that is starting to become ready are the strawberries, and we should probably update you on how we changed our strawberry management from the past couple of years: We started experimenting with growing strawberries a few years ago, and with some beginners luck, and younger knees and quads, it seemed like a good crop for us to add into the mix! It was a nice early season addition to our CSA availability, and they were delicious. But it came with some unique stress: the ability to have enough of a super popular crop for everyone each week during the season, the fact that the cost of their production was much higher than our vegetable crops and didn’t fit neatly into our CSA “item” system, and the toll it took on our ageing bodies to be in a strawberry harvesting position for hours every other day for several weeks. So we finally had to decide that we can’t produce the volume of strawberries that we would need to to have enough as a CSA item, which, believe me, was a HARD decision. And last year we planted way less for this season, and we are just harvesting what is available for the “extra purchases” cooler at CSA pickup in the barn. We will very likely open the patch up to pick-your-own in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned for that.

And in non-veggie news, two of my goats, Sophie and Noel, are moving to their new home at Shed Light Farm this weekend, where they will be the first two dairy goats to start their herd… and soon they will become four goats because Noel is due with twins in a few days. I am always reminded that I couldn’t cut it as a livestock farmer, that these ladies are just my pets, because it’s always hard to see them go, even if it’s the right call to keep our herd to a certain size. It’s a lot easier for me send bunches of vegetables off our farm every day, than spunky little goats with unique personalities every couple years!

Have a great week,

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

We have really been enjoying the spicy szchug in the cooler from Earth Sky Time, so we started making our own with whatever greens we have around. We enjoyed a version with pea shoots, because it added that lovely sweet pea flavor. Give it a whirl!

Pea Shoot Szchug