9th Week of the Spring CSA season: Week of May 1st

Apr 26

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have garlic, yellow potatoes, jumbo carrots*, beets, daikon radishes, rutabaga, yellow onions, mesclun mix, baby chard, green curly kale, kale rapini, spinach, pea shoots, and baby lettuce.

*Note on the carrots: We ran out of our winter storage carrots last week, and are filling in with very large organic carrots sourced from Juniper Hill Farm. They’re big but not bad: our kids are still chowing down on carrot sticks at dinner, and they tend to be our barometer for veggie flavor.

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

2 rows of small green head lettuce transplants spaced two feet apart on a garden bed mulched with shredded bark from ash trees — *head lettuce transplanted in a mulched bed in our high tunnel, shortly before planting a row of cucumbers down the middle, photo by Adam Ford*

close up of a tray of small zucchini plants with their large cotyledons and first true leaf in individual small plastic cups and plastic identification tag — *zucchini will go outside under lots of row cover in a couple weeks, photo by Adam Ford*

*tables and tables and tables of plants for sale at the end of May, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

We had a great farm week last week seeding and repotting most of the plant starts for people’s plant pre-orders, cleaning out several beds of finished greens from the high tunnels, transplanting the first round of tomatoes and cucumbers in the first tunnel(!!!), and transplanting peas, beets, cilantro, and scallions outside. The sunny days in the field were a real gift. This is a fun time of year to be shifting into more outdoor field work.

Next week we will continue transplanting cold hardy veggies outside like onions, leeks, shallots, kales, cabbages head lettuce, and parsley.

Busy world here, so enjoy a picture tour as the farm news this week!

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

Ispanakhis Phkali

Note on this recipe: This is a traditional Georgian spinach dip for a Georgian cheesy bread. We had an outstanding version of this recipe at a restaurant in NYC that used “Georgian spinach.” Upon asking the server for more information about that particular green, it seemed to be much different from our standard spinach, and closer to a broccoli raab type green. So when I made this at home, I used the kale rapini to emulate the taste and texture of what we were served at the restaurant. You can use any green in this recipe and it will still be delicious.