7th Week of the Spring CSA season: Week of April 17th

Apr 13

*tomato plants almost ready to transplant,. photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have garlic, yellow potatoes, carrots, beets, daikon radishes, Gilfeather turnip, rutabaga, yellow onions, sweet potatoes, claytonia, mesclun mix, green curly kale, baby kale mix, spinach, arugula, and baby lettuce.

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

*cukes almost ready for transplanting, photo by Adam Ford*

*lettuce heads ready to transplant, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week we potted up tiny little celery plants into bigger cells, as well as the second seeding of tomatoes into bigger pots. We continued the flow of seeding that happens every few days this time of year: looking at all the plants in the greenhouse, it’s amazing to look at everything and think that in a few weeks, we will be transplanting virtually all of it! And we transplanted a bed of beets into one of the tunnel beds where the winter greens were finished harvesting and removed. The fields continue to be too wet with all the rain this week to get the next round of outdoor seeding in the ground. It’s great that Ryan got that first planting of greens and other early crops in during that first week of March between snowfalls, but now it’s really time to get the next round in so we don’t have a lull in a greens harvest in a month or so.

Recently I joined an organizing committee with NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Association) to start building the foundation of organizing work to support the agricultural community and people who eat (so, everyone.) On Friday our committee had a full day training with an organizer from Minnesota’s Land Stewardship Action to learn about community power building and practiced using a screening tool to sort through various issues that might become the first campaign the committee works towards. The policy director at NOFA has been hosting listening sessions and one-on-one meetings throughout the year to get a sense of some of the biggest issues that the agricultural community faces, so we had a helpful foundation to start from. The realistic goal is to choose an issue that we believe could be achieved withing a 3-5 year time space, and there are lots of fertile issues to choose from, like addressing health care for farm workers, land access, and affordable food access for all, to name a few possibilities. According the the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, the country lost 141,433 farms between 2017 and 2022. Vermont is no exception to that trend, even as there are some bright spots: farms like us and other small farming operations that are finding ways to begin and continue farming. And yet, there are many increasing challenges to managing a farm business that is able to continue farming into the future. Our hope is that through community organizing aimed to influence policy change, we can address some of the biggest challenges that hinder farms of all scales from being able to manage successful businesses that nourish their communities and are a part of the healing of our strained ecosystems. So I am eager to see where some of this organizing work takes us.

Next week we will start the first round of all the plants for sale we start for all the pre-orders we manage. This is one of my favorite projects of the year. I LOVE imaging all the baby plants heading out to so many various summer gardens. Over the years some of you have sent us pictures of your gardens, and it’s nice to have a little peak into to all the garden joy out there.

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

Beet Pesto