Asparagus, radishes, salad turnips, bok choy, spring herbs, and salad greens are now filling our farmers' market tables. We also have plenty of fresh eggs, black beans, and our very own sauerkraut to round out a delicious meal. This week we begin our full market schedule, we hope you'll stop by: Tuesdays 3-5pm VA Hospital Farm Stand, in front of the main hospital at the gazebo Fridays 3-6pm Fairlee Farm Stand, in front of Chapmans Store Saturdays 9am-1pm Norwich Farmers' Market, look for our two red tents at the entrance Our CSA shares are off to a great start this week with a beautiful mix of salad greens, spinach, radishes, asparagus, bok choy, gold potatoes, and chives. It's salad season! This time of year, we eat greens with breakfast too! Check out the recipe section of our website for some ideas on how to make your own homemade salad dressings. It's a simple way to pull together a delicious salad in a variety of flavors for any meal of the day. We're glad this isn't snow! This white sea of remay covers our early cabbages, kale, broccoli, and cauliflower. We use row cover to protect all of our brassicas from flea beetle damage. In our high tunnels, scallions and basil are interplanted with trellised cucumbers. In the background, bok choy and spinach are ready to harvest for CSA shares. Vegetables galore! Our patchwork of fields is changing every day as we prepare the soil, plant more crops, and cover crops of rye and clover grow taller every minute. We finished planting our onions and leeks last week. Radishes, turnips, and spring successions of salad greens and brassicas are all starting to size up in the field. This week on the list to plant we have potatoes, parsley, radicchio, and the first of our field tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and zucchinis will go under row cover to protect them from possible frost. Ben has been working hard and looking super stylish in his fire-proof snail pattern welding hat. He's been designing and building a new cultivation system that's appropriate for the scale of our small farm. We're really excited to finally have this basket weeder set up on our Tuff-bilt cultivating tractor. With his new set up, Ben whizzed through the garlic weeding at high speed! The rear mounted engine of the Tuff-bilt allows for excellent visibility of the crop below. This little machine will be a big time saver for us.
This Friday, May 1st, marks the halfway point between spring equinox and the summer solstice. May Day, also known as Beltane, is an ancient spring festival celebrated by many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere. Here in central Vermont, Beltane marks the beginning of "summer", but perhaps more distinctly for us, it's the real beginning of our field planting season. Every table in our greenhouse is full and every bed is planted in our two hoop houses, every indoor growing space is bursting at the seams. We've been working hard to prepare the soil for planting and we have thousands of seedlings that are ready to head out to the fields. We're eagerly awaiting warmer, sunnier weather to kickstart new growth. This Saturday May 2nd, 9am-1pm
Norwich Farmers' Market (outdoors on Route 5!) We hope you'll join us on Saturday to celebrate our first outdoor farmer's market of the season! We'll be offering the first tender spring greens and radishes, plus our sweet overwintered carrots, our handmade sauerkraut, fresh eggs, and the first hardy plants to get started in your own garden. There will be over 50 vendors and live entertainment! Don't miss it! People often ask us what we do in the winter and they're surprised to hear this is still a busy time of year at the farm. Here's a quick look at what we're up to... We just finished our giant seed order that includes 161 varieties this year! Now we're working on our crop plan spreadsheets to refine our seeding schedules and plan the rotation and succession of crops around the farm this season. Our Fall/Winter CSA shares finished up strong in the last week of December. We were happy to have our second high tunnel to increase the diversity and quantity of winter greens in the shares this season. We've been working on analysis of this past season's CSA share value. Members who signed up for the Full Season saved 20% over local retail prices for comparable produce. We're pleased to show that our CSA is truly an economical source for local, organic produce. We're making progress on our new farm name! We're still refining our designs, but we plan to announce the new name and logo in February. We're preparing for farmers' market this weekend. Stop by, we'd love to see you!
Norwich Winter Farmers' Market at Tracy Hall on Saturday between 10-1pm. We'll have a nice selection of carrots, potatoes, cabbage, spinach, butternut, delicata, and kubocha winter squash, beets, turnips, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, heirloom dry beans, and don't miss our delicious sauerkraut! |
Newsletter Archives
December 2022
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