*peas are starting to produce! Photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: spinach, baby lettuce, rainbow chard, bok choi, head lettuce (green, red, and romaine), pea shoots, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, napa cabbage, green cabbage
Roots: salad turnips, daikon radish, fresh red beets with greens, fresh yellow beets with greens, red radish, fresh carrot bunches, free “farmer” parsnips (see the newsletter for a description of the farmer parsnips)
Alliums: scallions, chives, green onions, garlic scapes
Herbs: cilantro, sage, thyme, parsley
Fruiting crops: sugar snap peas, slicing cucumbers, Painted Mountain grain corn
Miscellaneous: rhubarb

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

*I don’t know why I am teasing us with this picture because these are a ways off, but look at them grow! photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

I can’t help but start the newsletter with a little food diversion because I am still day dreaming about how delicious it was…. This week I made a flat bread that was thinly sliced salad turnips, mini green onions, garlic honey, and camembrie cheese and it was divine. (We have the Blue Ledge camembrie in the cooler at the barn if you want to try it. And for folks who don’t come to the barn, I imagine any brie or camembert would be great.) The salad turnips were peeled, and diced into little sticks, the green onions (white and green parts) were finely chopped. I put the garlic honey right on the crust, then chunks of the camembrie, and then topped with the veggies. So good.

I want to start writing a newsletter about the farm, but can we cover one more flat bread? Make a chimichurri with the parsley, cilantro, and garlic scapes to use that as the sauce base, some type of mild/sharp cheese blend (like a mozzarella/asiago blend), and then garlic scapes chopped into 1-inch chunks, and thinly sliced parsnips*. So, so good.

*Parsnips! We are out of the acceptable ones to send out as items, but we have a copious amount of “farmer quality” ones that we are still eating and won’t finish ourselves before we need the bins back for zucchini harvest season. This week and next week, we will put those out at CSA display, and list them on the ordering form, and they are all free, they don’t count as a CSA item. (If you select them online, they should not register as an item, it should register as “0” toward your item count. If it is counting it as an item, let me know, and I can add it on the back end.) They require a hefty amount of cleanup: removing root hairs, peeling, cutting off bad spots… but once they are cleaned up, there is still plenty of good parsnip in there. So if you have the time and enjoy parsnips, load up.

While I am meandering through how we eat, it’s probably a fine time to offer my annual PSA that fresh beets with greens are like getting two items in one bunch: the roots obviously, but also the greens are like using a bunch of chard. Beets and chard are the same species: beets for their roots, chard for their greens. If you think you don’t like beet greens, give them a shot finely chopped sauteed with olive oil or butter, salt, and a splash of an acid like red wine vinegar or lemon juice. The acid does something to make the greens more enjoyable for folks who don’t tend to like them. They are great just as a sauteed pile like that, or toss them with some noodles, grated parmesan, and fresh black pepper. Or chop them up and use them in things like omelets, frittatas, and meat loaves.

This week will have the first harvest of garlic scapes, which is how we hold ourselves over until garlic bulbs are ready in about 3 weeks. We blend them up in place of minced garlic in recipes. And they are our favorite garlic source for pestos and chimichurri even when garlic bulbs become available. Part of what we enjoy doing as farmers is stick as closely to seasonal eating as possible. Even though we don’t have garlic bulbs and onions year round, the scapes, green garlic, scallions, and mini green onions make our spring eating more creative.

This week on the farm we will have pick-your-own strawberries available for purchase by the pint ($3.75 per pint) or by the pound ($4.50 per pound), instead of as a CSA item. We’ve grown strawberries since 2022, and we are ready to say goodbye to strawberries as a crop we grow for sale for various reasons: It was a fun run, but doesn’t completely fit well into our soil and weed management strategies, and has caused some repetitive motion injuries for the team, so despite its popularity, this will probably be the last year. (The first couple of years we were sourcing an outrageously delicious variety from Canada, but then we had a year where those plants arrived with disease and the customs process became prohibitively laborious, and the “best” variety we would access in the US just isn’t as delicious as we want for the work it takes.) This planting is the second year’s harvest, and that field has become a bit weedy, but there are still lots of beautiful strawberries easy to harvest. Help yourself to picking your own strawberries anytime that the CSA veggie setup is happening: Tuesday through Thursday, 9am-8pm. (If we haven’t removed all the bird netting when you come to pick, feel free to pull it off.) The patch is above the pick your own flower garden above the barn. (There are wooden signs pointing out the patch.)

Next week I will write this newsletter after actually eating breakfast so you get more than a stream of consciousness from my hungry foodie brain. But here’s a brief run down of what’s up at the farm these days: We are doing a good job of staying on top of the tomato and cucumber trellising, the few but important weeding projects in the fields, composting and mulching fields for fall plantings, and the weekly seedings we do throughout the year to have baby greens each week. It’s helpful to stay on all this now, because before we know it, the time of harvesting fruiting crops like zucchini, green beans, and outdoor peas will start cutting into trellising and weeding time.

Have a great week,

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

Grilled Garlic Scapes

We had these on the grill on Friday night, and they were perfection. Even our kiddo who prefers only having her veggies raw couldn’t get enough of these.