5th Week of the Fall CSA Season: Week of November 12th

Nov 8

*Looking up at the barn, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: green curly kale, rainbow chard, caraflex cabbage, green cabbage, bok choi, baby lettuce, head lettuce, spinach, brussels sprouts, brussels crowns*
Roots: red beets, yellow beets, carrots, watermelon radish, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, French fingerling potato, sweet potato fingerlings**, daikon radish, Gilfeather turnip, rutabaga, red radishes, parsnip
Alliums: garlic, yellow onions, red onions, shallots, leeks
Herbs: cilantro
Miscellaneous: fennel

*We started harvesting the second brussels sprout field and found a row whose brussels crowns we hadn’t harvested yet! So we get a round two of the brussels crowns this season!

** These sweet potato fingerlings are small and skinny. They are a Japanese variety, and really lovely to roast as is to make chunky fries, or to chop into small pieces for roasting. However, they will disappoint you if you are hoping for a large sweet potato. These tubers are about finger size.

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

*baby lettuce from the high tunnels, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

Fall started hunkering down this week, with our wash station closed in and warmed by wood heat, frosty mornings, and even the oak leaves falling down in the breezes. On Monday, with the parsnips, we finished up all of our root harvesting for the fall. We did leave half of our parsnips unharvested in the ground, where they will stay until the soil thaws in April. Those spring dug parsnips will be a real treat, their flavor becoming even more nourishing after the winter. For now, the green curly kale that we’re harvesting from the high tunnels is exceptionally tender, and the brussels crowns that are back now are even better now that they’ve been through a little frost.

This year we are continuing some experimenting to discover the limits of season extension. The past couple years we have planted onion sets (tiny onion bulbs the size of a marble) in early November, covering them with row cover so that they can begin growing in the late fall and early spring. This allows us to harvest onions about 3-4 weeks earlier in the summer in addition to the onions that we transplant in spring. This fall we’ll be direct seeding a wide range of crops into the soil as late as possible before the soil freezes or gets covered by snow. These vegetables will include lettuce, spinach, cilantro, arugula, beets, carrots, scallions, radishes, bok choi, salad turnips, kale, chard…most anything that is not a heat-loving, frost sensitive crop. We’ll cover these beds with row cover after seeding and see what happens! Many of these frost-tolerant species are quite hardy in the earliest stages of their growth, and I imagine that some of them will be able to germinate in the late fall or early spring and get a head start on our earliest spring seeded crops. In some ways this mimics a natural plant life cycle, in which the seeds set by a plant are scattered before winter where, depending on the species and circumstances, they will germinate in the fall or the spring. If it works well, we may be able to harvest some of those crops a week or two earlier than usual, which is always welcome in the transition season of spring.

Have a great week,

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

Roasted Veggie Ricotta Puff Pastry

This is a quick recipe, uses any veggies you want on top, and wows most potlucks or holiday gatherings