*Pollinator paradise, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, bok choi, pea shoots, green curly kale bunches, lacinato, rainbow chard, napa cabbage, green cabbage, caraflex cabbage
Roots: new red potatoes, salad turnips, red beet bunches, yellow beet bunches, red radish
Alliums: scallions, chives, fresh onions, garlic scapes, fresh garlic bulbs
Herbs: sage, parsley, basil tops
Fruiting crops: zucchini, summer squash, slicing cucumbers, Japanese slicing cucumbers, sugar snap peas,
Miscellaneous: rhubarb, broccolini, fennel

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

*Flower garden ready to harvest, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week the flower garden has exploded with blooms! The star of the show this week is Rudbeckia Hirta, which we planted several years ago. When we planted the seedlings in the spring, they flower in fall, and we expected the plants to winterkill, as they are considered a tender perennial hardy only to zone 8, which you would find in the southern mid-atlantic states. No chance of making it through our zone 4 winters! But somehow over the past few years these awesome flowers have not only reseeded themselves, but also consistently emerge in the spring from the overwintered root system, flowering in early-mid July. For folks who pick up at the barn, we hope you enjoy them and all the other flowers that come into bloom over the next few weeks. For anyone who may be new to our CSA, we have scissors and rubber bands available to harvest this complimentary thank-you for our CSA members. You may wish to bring your own jar of water to keep your bouquet fresh for the ride home. If not, just trim off a tiny bit of the stems when you get home and they should freshen right up in water. We love seeing how much joy this flower garden brings.

In addition to CSA, our farm provides vegetables for some really awesome community organizations. This summer we are able to send a truly impressive amount of vegetable each week to BROC Community Action in Rutland, whose mission is to “provide hope, opportunity, and a path forward out of crisis or poverty, so our neighbors and communities thrive”. We are also beginning to send a lot of vegetables to the Farmacy Project, managed by the Vermont Farmer’s Food Center, which makes CSA shares available to families of limited means whose doctors prescribe a CSA share to support their health. This week we will be bagging up over 60 pounds of pea shoots to send to the Farmacy project’s 250 CSA families. And those are just a couple of the amazing projects that we get to support by providing healthy food. We feel so lucky to have access to fresh and healthy vegetables for our family, and in our world of incredible complexity and inequality, it feels like a solid aspiration for all people to have access to good quality food that supports our health. It is through the efforts of many that it is possible for us to be a part of this web of community supporting itself.

Crop Report

Basil tops are especially beautiful and tender this week. For all of us who love sugar snap peas, they continue to be excellent. This may likely be the last week of peas, but the good news is that as they wrap up for the season we will likely be ready to begin harvesting tomatoes for next week. (Fingers crossed!) Our family has really been loving the beautiful early onions, especially sauteed along with fennel. Bok choi is looking amazing this week.

Sadly we will have a lull in carrots periodically for the next few weeks. We plant several seedings of carrots, beginning in February in our high tunnels and all the way through early July for the late fall harvested carrots. This spring, several of those plantings were completely gobbled by slugs as their first leaves emerged…what a bummer for this crop which is usually such a staple for us, and such a crowd pleaser with you all! Our later plantings have great germination and we are going to keep an especially close eye on them, and start harvesting them as soon as they are large enough.

Have a great week,

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

Tzatziki

It’s cucumber season! So we put tzatziki on most meals, yum…