CSA Balance Due

If you haven’t already paid, your balance is due. You can pay online through your account, mail a check to Evening Song Farm 48 Nice 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 email reminder that CSA payment is due: make that payment, let us know when you will be able to, or let us know if the amount due seems wrong. It adds a lot of extra computer time to try to repeatedly follow up with folks individually, so this is a simple way to lighten our administrative work. (Some of the auto emails have been a little funky, so we are happy to answer those questions if you get a weird one.) Thank you!

*ripening roma paste tomatoes, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have heirloom tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, paste tomatoes, grape tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, fresh shallot bunches, sweet onions, celery, fennel, garlic scapes, purple kohlrabi, basil, parsley, cilantro, green cabbage, baby lettuce, spinach, arugula, pea shoots, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, zucchini, summer squash, garlic bulbs, carrots, new potatoes, and spaghetti squash.

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 Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

If you have any trouble using the online to order your veggies this week (or change your pickup location, or skip this week, or anything…) reach out to us. It’s easy to help.

Farm News

I believe the highlight of the farm’s week this week was having one of our teammates, K2, come for her first visit to the farm since her mountain biking accident a month ago. She is really rocking her recovery, as seen below with Cindy, walking without her wheelchair. Go K2!

K2’s first day back at the farm! It’s hard to believe she broke 14 bones (3 more broken bones were found when she was fitted for that boot after surgery), and she is mobile now with her weight-bearing boot and wildly restrictive back and neck brace…. though she won’t be farming quite yet, it was so good to have her back to see how everything has been growing since her accident, photo by Kara

We heavily pruned the leaves from the cherry tomato plants to help encourage ripening of all the fruit over the next month, and also collected a nice bounty of hornworms while we did that. Hornworms are a pain, they are very quickly destructive to the plants and the fruit. They are large, and hungry. But our youngest kiddo LOVES bugs of all kinds, so she just quietly hung out underfoot, collecting all the hornworms I found while pruning in a bucket to play with them. We saw some of the hornworms with small, white balls on the outsides of their bodies: these are the pupae of a parasitic braconid wasp. The wasp lays its eggs in the hornworm, and the hatching larvae eat the insides of their host. When the white balls are visible on the outside of the hornworm, the larvae have pupated and will soon hatch into adult wasps. Interestingly, these wasps are able to parasitize the tomato hornworm because of a coevolution with a class of viruses knows as polydnavirusus, which live in the ovaries of the wasp and are not harmful to the wasp. But when the wasp lays its eggs in the hornworm, the polydnavirus infects the hornworm and disables the immune response that would otherwise prevent the larvae from developing inside the hornworm. (Farming feels like a dynamic, medieval knife fight when you squint your eyes and zone in on the micro activities among the plants.) We don’t spray anything for hornworms, we just pick them off the nearly 1000 tomato plants, one by one, which can be slow and tedious, so we are grateful for help from the parasitic wasps.

This close up of a hornworm eating a tomato leaf shows the white pupae cocoons and an adult wasp, photo by Ryan Fitzbeauchamp

We weeded and mulched fall crops. Katie seeded several fall plantings, and Ryan knocked down some cover crops and seeded others. Cindy has been diligently keeping up with the construction project and processing all the leftover slab wood. Onions were harvested and are curing in the field. Harvesting, washing, and packing takes up most of the rest of the crew’s time.

This time of year I can see the speed of the goat pasture grasses slow down, as well as the weeds in the veggie fields. This coupled with the shorter evenings remind me how short the summer season is here. There is still plenty of summer left, and thank goodness for kids, who make us squeeze out all the fun that summer brings. But the gardens are definitely shifting their energy towards fall despite the way I try to slow down the summer days. We’re already harvesting the first spaghetti squash and seeding the first greens for our winter tunnels… it all happens so fast.

Next week our strawberry tips will arrive that we will pot up and put under a continuous mist until they root to plant in a few weeks for next year’s harvest. And elderberries will start to be ready for harvest next week. We make elderberries available as items, but if you have any interest in getting bulk elderberries (if you make your own syrup or anything else), reach out to us, so we can get you on the bulk elderberry list when they are ready. Last year the elderberry crop completely failed, so we are excited to see such a robust harvest sizing up!

Have a great week,

ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, Molly, Taylor, K2, Galen, Vanessa, Katie, Cindy, Miguel, Jake, Regan, (and Sky, and Soraya)

Shakshuka