Snack peppers are one of my favorite snacks… and also make excellent school lunch snacks. In the past, we have only grown a few plants for ourselves, not realizing how much of a hit they would be with everyone, but it’s fun to have a huge long row of them this year. Photo by Adam Ford

CSA Balance Due

If you haven’t already paid, your balance is due. You can pay online through your account (with a card or e-check ACH payment), mail a check to Evening Song Farm 48 Nice Road, Cuttingsville VT 05738, leave a check or cash in the CSA cash box at the barn, send money with Venmo @eveningsongcsa, or use EBT. It’s very cool to pay in smaller chunks, just let us know what your payment plan is.

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow beets, red beets, parsley, scallions, baby lettuce, spinach, arugula, baby bok choi, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, zucchini, yellow summer squash, purple kohlrabi, celery, garlic, basil, Asian eggplant, Italian eggplant, husk cherries, Carmen sweet peppers, snack peppers, poblano peppers, jalapeño peppers, green serrano peppers, green tomatoes, sweet onions, shallots, leeks, cherry tomatoes, plum tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, and brussels crowns*.

*What are brussels crowns? Excellent question. This time of year, we top the brussels sprout plants, so the plants put their energy into making larger brussels sprouts versus taller plants. The tops are a delicious, tender, loose head that have a brussels sprout flavor, that we use like a cooking green. Our favorite way to have it is sauteed with garlic and olive oil. But you can use it any way you would use something like spinach. It’s a short seasonal treat, so jump on it soon if you are interested in trying it.

If you do any bulk preserving, now is a great time to snag jalapenos or if you use any for fermenting, hot sauce, pickled jalapenos, jalapeno jelly, or whatever! We have 8- and 10-pound bags of frozen elderberries available (as well as a couple random-sized small bags), and if you are inspired to preserve any eggplant for the winter, now is a good time for that as well. Send us an email for wholesale pricing on anything you are looking to preserve.

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

Farm News

The team removed the first round of tunnel tomatoes this week, as well as all the tunnel cucumber plants. It’s a big task, and always comes with a tiny tinge of sadness for me… the first sign that the seasons are changing. This time of year we start pulling summer plants form the tunnels to get winter greens established on time for fall and winter production. We also clear out the tunnels for a soil steamer we rent for a week. The steamer allows us to kill our weed seed bank in the tunnels, which is essential for all the baby greens we grow during winter production. The particular tomato plants they pulled this week were past their prime anyway… those plants didn’t like how much more humid that tunnel was this year with the insect exclusion netting we put on the tunnel for the cucumber plants, so we have to figure out to increase ventilation in that tunnel next year to grow better tomatoes alongside cucumbers. The tomatoes in one of the other tunnels are absolutely booming at the moment. They have been healthy all season, and they are really loving the summer extension we had with the hot temperatures this week. The cucumbers will be done for the season though… we have a small amount coming out of the outdoor planting, probably only enough to put in the display cooler at the barn… til next year, cucumbers!

We also continued getting harvested fields into cover crop seedings, and continued clipping cured garlic in the root cellar.

This week we learned that the strawberry tips that we import from a Canadian grower came with a bit of a fungal disease—anthracnose—which can really destroy strawberry plants. Ours look pretty good compared to what other growers have reported who also grow this variety from this farm. The disease is a result from the exceptionally wet season the entire region has been having this season, since moist, humid conditions are ideal for fungal diseases. And the pathogen didn’t present symptoms until this grower send probably over 100,000 tips out to growers all over the northeast. We are using some sterilization and inoculant based mitigation measures, and hope we can control the disease spread before we transplant them in the field. If not, we aren’t quite sure what this means for a potential strawberry crop next season. But as the farmer who coordinates the purchase of these tips for all the Vermont growers said in her email as we collectively trouble shoot this problem: “Well, this is farming at its finest.” (You can do all the things, and everything can look great, and then bam, some new issue will secretly arise when you feel confident in one of your production methods.)

But here is something fun, I don’t believe we remembered to share with you all: This year we were the lucky recipients of the Eric Rozendaal Memorial Award which provides a small grant to a farm to implement a project. Eric Rozendaal ran Rockville Market Farm, and is known for his pioneering, innovative approaches, and commitment to community. We plan to use the award to create a better CSA pickup space in the barn that we have been scheming about for a few years now. We hope to have those plans finalized soon to start work on it this fall, so that by next season we have a space that can serve our community with a bit more abundance.

And I haven’t forgotten that there is one more message frame to write about from the climate narrative project I am participating in this year. I will aim to write about that next week!

Have a great week,

-ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, Cindy, Galen, Katie, K2, Taylor, Vanessa, and Bryan (and Sky and Soraya)

Weekly Recipe

Mediterannean Rice Salad