7th Week of the Summer CSA Season: July 8th

Jul 5

*field of peppers getting a little water in the dry spell, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, pea shoots, arugula, spinach, bok choi, green curly kale, lacinato kale, rainbow chard, frilly head lettuce, mini romaine
Roots: fresh beet bunches with greens, rutabaga, red radishes, salad turnips
Alliums: garlic scapes, fresh onions, scallions
Herbs: parlsey, cilantro
Miscellaneous: Rhubarb
Fruiting crops: sugarsnap peas, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers

*We are not listing zucchini and summer squash this week, because we are really stumped by these fruits again this week. It really looks like they should be ready to harvest this week, but they looked the exact same way last week, and haven’t budged yet. This is a new zucchini world to us, so we just don’t know when we can list them on the order form… We believe that at some point, they will grow, and then we will swim in zucchini and summer squash, just like a normal summer. Stay tuned!

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

*pole beans after the trellis is set up and the mulch is laid down, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week we caught up on trellising several tomato rows that got away from us, planted the last of the storage potatoes, and another round of brussels sprouts, storage cabbage, and another round of head lettuce. Cindy finished getting the pole beans trellised, and the mulching squad continued to cover the fields with shredded bark and straw. The pick-your-own strawberries are winding down, and when they are done we will renovate the patch to prepare them for next year, which requires removing the majority of the plants, and putting down a lot more mulch for continued weed suppression.

On Thursday evening we got hit by a localized hail storm: 6 minutes of hail that was bigger than peas were pounding down, and I just watched from the porch hoping the plants were going to fare ok. Amazingly, no damage occured to any of the plants in the field. This is the first time we had hail hit our crops, so it felt a little more stressful than it probably needed to feel, since I have heard plenty of stories from other veggie farmers of how shredded their plants can be from a hail storm.

It’s been a spring and summer of hard goat things over here. Our little dairy goat hobby is generally pretty easy and joy-filled, but the reality of keeping animals is that hard things do happen sometimes. Our goat Bella was due with a baby this week, but the baby was stillborn this morning, and needed a lot of our assistance to remove the baby. As I type this, she is currently still recovering from such a tough birth experience, but we are keeping a close eye on her needs, and hope she rebounds soon. Our kiddos named the baby Sunny, and he’s buried next to our goat, Zeah, who died this spring after a very long, full, lovely goat life. It’s experiences like these that make me rethink keeping goats: are the losses and stresses worth the sweetness they bring to our lives? Not a question to answer on the day of a loss, but something to percolate on. It is generally why we farm vegetables and not animals. When we experience a hard animal thing, I feel an extra sense of gratitude for my livestock farmer friends, with their greater opportunity for hard things, caretaking more animals.

Going to sneak off and get a nap now! Have a great week,

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

Spring Beet Salad