*We’re excited that this year our blueberry bushes are producing enough to include in the CSA! Photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have purple kohlrabi, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, fresh sweet onions, rainbow carrots*, summer squash, zucchini, fennel, garlic, green cabbage, red cabbage, caraflex cabbage, red and yellow potatoes, French filet green beans, garlic scapes, scallions, green curly kale, lacinato kale, spinach, baby lettuce, mini romaine heads, pea shoots, basil, cilantro, parsley, sage, oregano, thyme, slicing tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and blueberries!

*Rainbow carrots will be a baby-sized mix of red, orange, and purple carrots. They were a fun experiment to try this year, but the wet weather led to foliar dieback that prevented them from fully sizing up. A later planting of carrots looks very good now, and will hopefully get to grow to full size in a few weeks.

Blueberries? Yes! We have a couple rows of berries that we planted when we moved the farm up here and are finally old enough to be producing enough for CSA! Enjoy!

CSA Bag Delivery Order Form

Fill out the delivery form by noon on Tuesdays.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

*It was fun to see so many folks pick from the flower garden this week…we hope you’ll continue to enjoy the flowers as they come in season…there’s lots more to come! Photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News from Ryan

What a sigh of relief to have a few days in a row without rain. Our fields are drying out and we’ve been able to do the weeding that needed to happen for our fall carrots and beets. If we miss the window of opportunity to remove weeds when they are small, it becomes much more laborious. With all the weeding that was needed on these direct seeded crops, it’s helpful that our transplanted fall crops don’t need the same attention. All of our fall cabbage, kohlrabi, brussels sprouts, kale, and broccoli are transplanted through thick mulch, and they need almost no weeding once they’re planted. Before we adopted that technique, it was challenging for us to keep up with all the weed competition over our whole farm…there’s just so much space to cover and many weeds grow so quickly! It’s been a real game-changer to be learning about and implementing new growing practices that help our overall farm managment.

It was a joy for us to see how many people harvested flowers from the pick-your-own garden! Growing flowers is a relatively recent hobby for us…when we started vegetable growing we were even somewhat dogmatic about only growing vegetables! In the past few years it’s been fun to look at flower catalogs in the winter and try growing a few new flowers every year. The pick-your-own garden was an inspiration that grew from the way that our farm transitioned in response to the pandemic. Right before Covid In February 2020 our daughter Soraya—1 1/2 at the time—was hospitalized for almost a week with RSV and pneumonia, where she was given oxygen and closely monitored for her oxygen levels dropping too low... the third hospitilzation needing oxygen in her young life at that point. When the pandemic started feeling very real a couple weeks later, it was clear to our family that we didn’t want to risk her health through the high public exposure of vending at farmers’ markets. Very suddenly, we dropped out from the two farmers markets we had been attendending ever since the beginning of Evening Song Farm, and at the time provided well over half of our farm’s sales. It was a rapid change that we were fortunate to have the flexibility to do. We were also fotunate that it coincided with many people expressing interest and signing up to receive vegetables through the CSA.

Last spring was a whirlwind to majorly reorganize our farm’s marketing and distribution…I remember at first packing up hundreds of paper bags with vegetables and putting them outside the barn for people to pick up; later setting up vegetables in the barn and rotating them in and out of cold storage before we purchased the display cooler we use now. But the gift from all that reorganization is that we really love getting to be entirely a CSA farm. Having this much interest in our CSA, and being able to focus on a CSA as the primary way that our food is distributed, enables us to manage the farm more effectively and makes our work more sustainable for us and our crew over the long-term. The transition to being mostly a CSA farm allows us to experiment with growing a variety of fun new crops, we’re able to have full weekends in the summer to spend wih our family, we can be more efficient in what we grow and harvest, and it allows us a dependable way to distribute the food so that we can focus on improving at being good caretakers of this small piece of the earth, so that our kids or someone else’s kids can find this piece of land well-tended and productive decades later. All that is to say that we’re very thankful for the CSA members who support what we do. Growing a wild flower garden for members to enjoy at the farm is a little way that our whole team can use our skills to share our thanks for the CSA community, and to make it even more exciting for folks nerby enough to visit the farm to pick out veggies. If you enjoyed picking flowers in there last week, just wait… it’s about to explode with blooms in the next couple weeks!