This Week’s Availability

This week we will have leeks, spaghetti squash, delicata squash, purple kohlrabi, red and yellow beet bunches, Ailsa Craig sweet onions, shallots, carrot bunches, garlic, red cabbage, red and yellow potatoes, jalapeno peppers, garlic scapes, green curly kale, lacinato kale, pea shoots, arugula, baby bok choi, brussels crowns, basil**, parsley, heirloom tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, grape tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, roma tomatoes, green tomatoes, tomatillos, husk cherries, baby lettuce mix, and spinach!

Hooray, baby lettuce and spinach are back! This week the green curly kale bunches will be from a new planting, and it is especially tender and exceptional.

*What are brussels crowns? In the beggining of September we remove the tender growing tip of brussels sprout plants to force the energy of the plant into producing nice, large brussels sprouts instead of continued vertical stalk growth. We find these tops to be a delicious, brussels sprout flavored cooking green that we use the way you would use kale or collards. A favorite in our house is shredded and sauteed into mac and cheese, or just sauteed with garlic and olive oil as a side dish. They will probably only be availble for a couple weeks!

**This will be the last week basil is available. (Check out the bulk list below if you want any for pesto processing.)

*this cute little ribbed variety-Marsalato-is a bit drier like a roma tomato, photo by Adam Ford*

Bulk vegetables available for processing

When we have bulk amounts available with veggies, we like to pass along our wholesale prices to CSA members in case you want to do some processing. Now is the time! Below are the current wholesale prices for certain veggies. If you are interested in getting a bulk amount of anything, send us an email. Thanks! (We aren’t sure how much longer we will have the bulk amount of tomatoes available, and this is the last week for basil, as a heads up.)

Roma tomatoes: $28 for 10 pounds, $50 for 20 pounds

Heirloom Tomatoes: $28 for 10 pounds, $50 for 20 pounds

Beefsteak Tomatoes: $28 for 10 pounds, $50 for 20 pounds

Green Tomatoes: $20 for 10 pounds, $33 for 20 pounds

Parsley: $20 for 10 bunches, $36 for 20 bunches

Basil: $12 per pound (will run out)

Onions: $20 for 10 pounds, $35 for 20 pounds

Green Curly Kale: $14 for 5 bunches, $24 for 10 bunches

Lacinato Kale: $14 for 5 bunches, $24 for 10 bunches

Garlic: $12 per pound

Jalapenos: $6 per pound, $25 for 5 pounds

Want to know what we do to preserve these items?

For the freezer: Tomato basil soup, chimichurri, kale (chopped up, lightly sauteed with olive oil, to use in omelettes, stews, pastas in the winter), basil pesto, parsley pesto, and garlic scape pesto. (We use garlic scapes in place of garlic in all our pestos… much faster to process than peeling garlic!)

For the pantry: Tomato sauces, salsas, fermented hot sauce (which we put in the fridge after it ferments.)

CSA Bag Delivery Order Form

Fill out the delivery form by noon on Tuesdays.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

*Onions curing in between tomato rows with a fan keeping air circulating, photo by Adam Ford*

Vermont Farmers’ Food Center’s 2021 Harvest Fest

The Vermont Farmers’ Food Center is an essentional part of this region’s food shed, supporting various layers of the food system in our area. If you love the work they do, or the fact that we live in a vibrant food shed with many thriving, local farms, consider getting tickets for their 2021 Harvest Fest. The website says they have both take out options or outdoor dining options for the event.

NOFA-VT Cost-shared CSA Program

We particiapte in a program with the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont to provide half priced CSA share to families who qulify for that support. If you would like to apply to the program, the deadline for their fall share program is September 30th. And if you are looking for ways to continue to support the community, they are also fundraising for more funds for the program: you can donate here, and if you mention Evening Song Farm, you would be directly supporting another family who gets the same veggies as you.

Farm News

We have been working hard to remove many of the summer plants from the tunnels and prepare the beds for winter seeding and transplanting. One of the challenges of utilizing our high tunnerls for both summer and winter production is the transitions: every year we need to turn the tunnels over quickly in the fall and spring in order to get each season’s crops planted on time. Over time, our population of winter weeds has increased significantly in our tunnels, requiring a lot of time for us to handweed those baby greens. As we’ve grown winter greens for several years, we’ve also noticed more soil-borne disease pressure in our tunnels, white mold that kills spinach plants or other fungal diseases like Rhizoctonia that wipe out lettuce plants. This year we will be trying an innovative technique that many other vegetable farms have been using with success: we’ll be renting a soil steamer from the Cheshire County Conservation District in New Hampshire to heat the top two inches of the soil to 170F, the temperature at which most weed seeds and soil disease organisms are killed. It sounds like it would also kill all the beneificial and vibrant soil life, but we have learned from research done by the UVM extension that the soil microbiology bounces back very quickly after steaming. We only have the machine for a week, and it takes a lot of time to set up on each bed, and then actually run the machine, so this year we will only be able to steam a fraction of our total tunnel space. For the rest of the winter beds, we are preparing those beds now, irrigating them to encourage the weed seeds to germinate, and then killing those with a flame weeder before seeding and transplanting in a week or so. That simple step will save us many hours of meticulous hand-weeding. We will have some cool pictures of the process to share in the newsletter next week.

This week Ryan got many of the fall cover crops seeded…it’s a relief to do that final step after which fields are ready for the winter And we continued seeding trays of greens for more winter transplanting. 3,500 strawberry plants for next spring got transplanted out into the field, and they are looking good!

Have a great week!

-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, Molly, Morgan, Grace, Cindy, Taylor, Katie

Weekly Recipe: Chicken Alfredo Spaghetti Squash Casserole