THANK YOU!

Thanks for joining the fall CSA season. We always appreciate everyone’s support and confidence in getting weekly veggies from this farm. We haven’t set the dates and rates for the next season yet, but you will receive an email by the end of this month about signing up for next season. Stay tuned!

CSA Balance

This is the last week 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 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.

*cut patch of the tat soi that goes in the mesclun mix…. what you see in the background is what is left to cut of of the different greens for the last week of CSA, photo by Kara*

This Week’s Availability

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

***This 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 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

In last week’s newsletter I said I would try to formulate coherent thoughts about the things we are thinking about in terms of envisioning what the future holds for how we run this farm. So here is my best crack at it…

When the pandemic hit, we made the big shift of dropping farmers’ markets (about 50% of the farm’s income at the time), and more than doubled our CSA membership to replace that. That was a BIG change that we made within a WEEK. (My head spins a bit just thinking about that time, oof.) We were so lucky that interest in our CSA program was enough to fill the gap from that previous income stream of farmers’ markets. (Thank you!!) And we had to create a way for folks to continue getting their CSA share as a free-choice model, delivered into Ludlow and Rutland, where we used to attend farmers’ markets. For those of you who were with us during that time, you might remember a couple weeks where we packed bags with less choice: you told us if you wanted all greens, all roots, or a combination of greens and roots. This band-aid helped us have a little time to develop an ordering system: then we created some homemade systems to use google forms to fill out weekly orders that we compiled for harvesting and packing. That worked pretty well. That whole year we were researching and talking with all the various CSA software platforms that exist to shift our homemade ordering systems to a professional platform that we hoped would work better for our behind the scenes management, and decrease my computer work load. The software system we have been using this past year has been working well enough after lots of tweaking from the software folks at that company, but it costs a lot, and it still has some functions that don’t align just right with our CSA program. So ever since we have made that shift from dropping farmers’ markets to doing these weekly ordered/delivered bags, we have wondered: Are we going to do this option forever? Is there a better way to provide food to folks off the farm? Will we ever just drop delivered bags, and only have an on-farm CSA program? How would we have to scale back production if our CSA membership shrunk from eliminating our delivery options? Alternatively, can we continue providing delivered bags if we raise the price on that option to account for the increased labor and software costs?

These are some of the questions we have been asking ourselves. And we haven’t made any forward progress on answering them. They live as queries in our brains as we manage the day to day of the farm, observing where our work and energy goes, thinking about how that can shift for the future.

Usually I assume it’s best to wait to share ideas about any farm change with our wider CSA community once we actually know what those changes will be. Last week I read Essex Farm’s weekly newsletter and they very candidly shared how hard their production year was and how they were in the middle of lots of questions and reimaging. It made me realize that it’s ok to share our thoughts and queries with our biggest supporters (you all) even before we have it all figured out.

The line in Essex Farm’s newsletter that spoke most loudly to me was: “There’s a psychic cost to being too busy to be still with your family, generous with your team, and with yourself.” This is the hardest part to farming for me. Even when we are done working outside with the crew, or even when the computer is shut down for the evening, the mental checklists are humming, because we are working with a living system that doesn’t stop having needs when we want to go “home” from work. We are busy. And it makes it hard to be a good parent… when I am often trying to make website updates on a laptop tucked under a coffee table while playing a dinosaur memory game with my kids, so they don’t notice that I am half typing on a hidden screen, and half trying to remember which upside down square is a mosasaurus. So when we are in touch with our busy-ness, it makes us think about how we can re-imagine the farm’s operation to see if we can scale back what we do, and tame some of that busy-ness.

We have seen farmers, including in our age bracket, throw in the towel in the past couple years for several factors. The reasons tend to relate to burnout, work/life balance, stress, income, land access, continued future climate disruption, the physical toll on working bodies, etc. We know those decisions were never easy for those farmers to make, and we appreciate how brave and hard those decisions must have been. But right now, we are both still very committed to running Evening Song Farm, and we have always run a farm with the majority of the veggies being produced for a CSA program. We’re so grateful to get to work with such an amazing group of people, and to grow healthy food for our community. We feel the love, support, and gratitude regularly from our CSA members… That is very cool. And it’s a privilege to steward a chunk of the earth, in hopes that we are leaving it in better shape than we found it. So we are asking these questions about how our farm runs, so that we can continue to farm. We may not exactly know how things will evolve around here yet, but you can count on us continuing to farm vegetables and a super fun pick-your-own flower and herb garden.

We will be using January and February to carve out intentional brainstorming and planning to explore in what way this farm has to evolve to next. Some of this farm’s biggest shifts in evolution so far have been precipitated by outside factors: Tropical Storm Irene made us get bigger to afford rebuilding, having kids made us hire out more of my own role on the farm, the pandemic made us drop farmers’ markets and expand our CSA… It will be fun to feel a bit more in the driver’s seat of some of our next decisions, and see where that takes this project. And maybe it will continue to look the same from the outside looking in. Who knows.

Thank you for being a part of the fall CSA season. None of this project would be possible without the wildly supportive CSA members we have. So thanks for being a part of this! Have a lovely rest of January and you will hear from us soon about when sign ups are available for the next CSA season. Stay tuned.

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