*Scallions are ready to harvest this week, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: spinach, baby lettuce, pea shoots, curly kale, baby kale, kale rapini*, baby chard, parsley, and green cabbage
Roots: carrots, yellow potatoes, rutabaga, Gilfeather turnip, red beets, watermelon radish, daikon radish
Alliums: onions, scallions, green garlic**

*Kale rapini are the tender spring shoots of overwintered kale with delicate leaves, tender stems, and florets like broccoli raab. Use like broccoli raab, but it’s a bit sweeter. Seasonal to April and early May.

**Green garlic are the tender young shoots of garlic cloves planted in the fall. They are similar to scallions, with a ‘fresh’ garlic flavor in place of a fresh onion flavor. They can be used raw (chopped or blended) or cooked (sauteed, baked, grilled…).

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

*The propagation house is getting full, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week was a big week in our propagation house, as we’ve begun seeding and potting up some of the thousands of plants that we grow for the spring plant sale. A few years ago, we purchased a nifty tag printer that makes it so much easier to label all the packs that we seed…it’s just too much to write them all out by hand. So far this year it hasn’t given us any trouble…knock on wood. And in a stroke of even more good luck, this year the pellet furnace in the propagation house has also worked seamlessly. I distinctly remember a cold March night last year where one of the augers on the furnace periodically malfunctioned…after a late night futzing with it, I considered setting up a sleeping bag on a greenhouse table to be right there in case of an issue. While it’s nice to be able to utilize a regional forest product to heat our greenhouse in the spring, there’s a reason that very few if any commercial greenhouse operations utilize solid fuel to heat their greenhouses—propane, heating oil, and natural gas are much more hands-off, with less moving parts in the heating infrastructure. But for the short season when we need to heat our single seedling greenhouse, it’s workable to use wood pellets for us. At least, that’s how it feels right now when everything is working as it should!

Otherwise, we’ve seeded sugarsnap peas outside and continued outdoor seedings of beets, carrots, lettuce, arugula, spinach, salad turnips, bok choi, radishes, and cilantro. All of those crops had their first seeding on March 19th, thanks to the warm spell we enjoyed in early March that melted all our deep snow. (Hard to remember after all these April snow showers!) Those plantings are slowly germinating and growing under their row covers. I love this time of year, where if you look closely you can see little changes every day…poplar catkins catching the sunlight, willow twigs greening, silvery serviceberry buds growing out from the twigs.

Have a great week,

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

Green Goddess Salad Dressing