CSA Balance

These are the last two weeks of the fall CSA share, please make plans to pay your balance for the season. You can pay online through your account, mail a check to Evening Song Farm 48 bvcxxxzNice Road, Cuttingsville VT 05738, or leave a check in the CSA cash box at the barn. It’s very cool to pay in smaller chunks, just let us know what your payment plan is. You can also email or call us to pay with EBT.

If you get an auto email about a balance due, either pay that, or reach out if you think it’s wrong. It helps reduce our computer work load if payments are taken care of when a notice goes out. Thanks!

*heads of romaine in the display cooler, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have leeks, green kohlrabi, baby lettuce, mini lettuce heads, rainbow chard, spinach, claytonia, green curly kale, red beets, yellow beets, carrots, garlic, yellow onions, purple and white daikon radishes, baby kale, mesclun mix, green napa cabbage, watermelon radish, celeriac, green cabbage, and red and yellow potatoes.

***Next week is the last week of this CSA season, and then we are taking a break for a few weeks. Please plan to make up your missed items this week and next week, before this season ends.

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag

Ordering closes at noon on Tuesdays for Wednesday bags, and at midnight on Wednesdays for Friday bags.

You do not need to fill out the form if you plan to come to the barn on Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Farm News

Happy end to 2022! This year had some real highlights for Evening Song Farm. By far, the number one highlight for this year was our crew this year was top-notch, and we were so lucky to have such an amazing group of people helping this farm run. In the past few years, it’s become a common theme among vegetable farms across the region to have difficulty finding enough skilled employees to run a farm, but somehow we have dodged that issue. We’re so grateful to have a full team of incredible people who bring to their work a sense of teamwork, playfulness, motivation, joy, and support for each other and this project. This year our team took on new responsibilities and managed the farm more independently than ever before. It’s hard to overstate our gratitude…our team makes this farm both possible, and a joy to be a part of. Especially in juxtaposition to the labor issues others farms experience, we know this team is a big asset of this farm and makes this work worth doing.

We are grateful to have gotten most of the new building up. We are excited to finally have all the solar panels this farm needs for its electrical demand, and we are just waiting for GMP to hook it up. (I think that final step got lost in the weeds during the last two winter storms they had to attend to!) We look forward to finish setting up the inside space of that new building, and then maybe getting to dive into the expansion and improvement of the barn CSA space.

We continue to fine tune our soil building and management, and observe the fruits of that attention when we work in the field. To think that when we first borrowed this land from the French’s after Irene, and we observed and dealt with really inadequate soil to try growing quality veggies in, and compare that to what we get to work with now, it’s amazing what a decade of soil improvement can produce.

Of course, we had a standard amount of challenges with this growing season as well: some production challenges from pests, plant diseases, nutrient management, hot and dry weather. It’s fun and rewarding to grow over 50 different crops, but it means that not everything will be optimal all the time. And while we made some wonderful improvements to the balance between our personal lives and working lives, we’re still looking to improve the dynamic relationship between the two. But that will be the theme for our break between this CSA season and the next one: we plan to put some intentional focus into figuring out how to evolve this farm in a way that we can feel more nourished by this job than worn out by it. I’ll even try formulating my thoughts about that for next week’s newsletter, since we know some of you appreciate getting the full perspective of what happens behind the scenes here.

So that about rounds out our thoughts on 2022! Happy New Year to everyone. May this year bring you joy, balance, stillness, reimagining, love, and whatever else you may need in 2023.

ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, Galen, Taylor, Molly, Cindy, Katie, K2, Sky and Soraya

Weekly Recipe

The recipe button below will take you to a different website for this citrus-y winter salad. The green they use in this recipe is claytonia, and they are using the name miner’s lettuce. (Claytonia has a plethora of names.) This recipe uses claytonia and beets from the farm, and adds the seasonal (but from very far away!) ingredient of some good citrus. Enjoy!

Citrus, Beet, and Claytonia Salad