9th Week of the Spring CSA Season: Week of April 29th

Apr 24

*blueberry buds in the barn field, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: green curly kale, kale rapini, spinach, baby lettuce, baby chard, green cabbage
Roots: red beets, yellow beets, large carrots*, watermelon radish, yellow potatoes, daikon radish, Gilfeather turnip, parsnips**
Alliums: scallions
Herbs: parlsey
Fruiting crops: frozen heirloom and beefsteak tomatoes, Painted Mountain grain corn

*This time of year when we start running out of some of the popular storage veggies, we bring them in from another certified organic farm, Juniper Hill Farm. Their carrots are a different storage variety, and they are larger and less sweet, but still a great carrot. I also tend to peel theirs for cosmetic reasons, while usually I don’t peel ours. Just a heads up, since we get A LOT of comments on how much people love the specific carrot variety we grow.

**Most of the spring dug parsnips have surface damage that Ryan wrote about below. It can be peeled off to a predominantly good parsnip. They will take a little more work to clean up than the ones we harvested and stored from the fall.

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

*fields mulched and composted and ready for transplants, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week on the farm is memorable every year: the time of the season when the grass has greened up, but before the trees have leafed out, when we plant the first tomatoes and cucumbers in our single heated high tunnel. People are often surprised that, except for the new few weeks of the year, we don’t heat any of our large high tunnels. The Trunchbull, where we just planted tomatoes and cucumbers, is hooked up to a pellet boiler, so we can burn wood pellets that will heat the air inside the tunnel on cold nights. At full-blast it can put out enough heat to raise the temperature about 15 degrees above the overnight low…it isn’t much, but it allows us to plant those popular summer vegetables about 3 weeks earlier than we would be able to without that buffer. When we installed that pellet boiler 9 years ago, I did a considerable amount of work to bury loops of pipe 18 inches deep under each of the 7 beds in the tunnel. After an equally considerable amount of work piecing together pipes, fittings, heat exchangers, manifolds, and thermostats, we were able to circulate hot water under the soil to have the ability to warm up the soil sooner in the season. It was an auspicious time on our farm! But while other vegetable farms do utilize ground heat in that way, this particular project ended up not being a great fit for our farm: the expense of purchasing wood pellets didn’t yield an outstanding return for us in the form of additional greens to harvest in the cold and dark winter months. But moreover, all of that plumbing to circulate water underground was vulnerable to a power outage, which would prevent the circulator pump from cycling water through the system, very quickly allowing water to freeze and break the above-ground pipes and fittings. After a few years of heating the soil through those loops in the ground, I’ve disconnected the ground heat so that the boiler is only heating the air in that tunnel. It’s still a lot of equipment to maintain in order to harvest cucumbers and tomatoes a few weeks earlier, but those vegetables are so desired earlier in the season, and we prefer to avoid using a fossil fuel burning heat source for our greenhouses if possible.

Otherwise this week it has been a joy to be preparing fields outside and setting seeds and transplants into the soil. Spring is an amazing season…I wonder if you’ve noticed any life emerging in the woods or the fields that you hadn’t noticed before.

Have a great week,

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

Scallion Vinaigrette