*overwintered kale gets so tender this time of year as it tries to start going to seed, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: green curly kale, spinach, baby lettuce, claytonia, baby chard, green cabbage
Roots: red beets, yellow beets, chioggia beets, large carrots*, watermelon radish, yellow potatoes, daikon radish, Gilfeather turnip, parsnips**
Alliums: garlic, yellow onions, scallions
Herbs: parlsey
Fruiting crops: frozen heirloom and beefsteak tomatoes, Painted Mountain grain corn

*This time of year when we start running out of some of the popular storage veggies, we bring them in from another certified organic farm, Juniper Hill Farm. Their carrots are a different storage variety, and they are larger and less sweet, but still a great carrot. I also tend to peel theirs for cosmetic reasons, while usually I don’t peel ours. Just a heads up, since we get A LOT of comments on how much people love the specific carrot variety we grow.

**Most of the spring dug parsnips have surface damage that Ryan wrote about below. It can be peeled off to a predominantly good parsnip. They will take a little more work to clean up than the ones we harvested and stored from the fall.

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

Farm News

It was nice to enjoy the days where the sun peaked out this week. Just like the baby plants in the prop house, I am very much over the cold gray days, and eager for a shift into a sunnier spring. The plants in the propagation house look awesome this spring. It’s hard not to feel incredibly optimistic this time of year on a veggie farm. I have written about this in the past, but during my first conversation with Greg Cox over at Boardman Hill Farm in West Rutland 15+ years ago when we moved here, he told me that farmers are the most optimistic people: Every spring, despite all the accumulated flops and challenges of the past season, and the many years before that, a veggie farmer stands in their propagation house looking at all the healthy, vibrant, eager baby plants and sees a highly successful season ahead of them, where this is The Year That Our New Experiments And Learned Lessons Will Conquer All The Previous Pest, Disease, or Weather Challenges Of The Past. (That’s a pretty exciting future to look out upon during spring!)

This week, new rows of baby beets are tucked into the tunnel where winter greens have been harvested out and removed. Sugar snap pea seedlings are poking up in the tunnels. The first round of tomatoes are less than 2 weeks away from transplanting into the ground. The team did a bunch of outdoor field prep this week, removing tarps, moving covers, prepping fields for direct seedings and transplants.

In a couple weeks, I get to take our kiddos south to visit family for their spring break, which is amazing that I get to step away from the greenhouses this time of year, but Ryan and the team are rockstars, so it will go great. But it takes a lot of extra planning and prep work to have all the propagation house seedings mapped out with enough detail from my brain for everyone to manage in my absence, so that organizational task is taking up some of my brain space these days. We start thousands of plants for sale for pre-orders and to choose as items for the end of the spring CSA season and beginning of the summer season, and it takes a comedic amount of spreadsheets to organize the seeding dates, labeling, and layout for all those plants. But it’s probably also my favorite part of my work, because I sometimes say that I accidentally became a veggie farmer because I started as an overenthusiastic home gardener and that hobby got a little out of control, ha. So I really love tucking all these little plants in as I imagine their future homes in so many gardens around the county… facilitating that joy and satisfaction of stepping outside your house to pick some fresh cherry tomatoes for your salad, still warm from the sun as you slice them on your plate. (If you don’t keep a garden, do yourself a favor, and pick up one husk cherry plant to put in a hanging basket outside your front door. You will not regret having ripe little, tropical flavored fruits littering your doorway at the end of August.)

Have a great week,

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

Bright Spring Bowl

Want to eat what I ate today?