Thank you for being a part of this season’s summer CSA! It continues to be a weird time to be a human in the world, and we have been grateful for all the folks who have chosen to get veggies from us. Eating Evening Song Farm veggies helps a small farm focus on our work as land stewards earnestly addressing the climate crisis, keeps several folks employed doing work they love, supports the subsidized CSA shares of lower income families, enables the donation of thousands of pounds of fresh veggies to various points of food insecurity, and gives us great joy when we experience yours—— watching everyone’s delight at the pick your own flower garden this year was a season highlight. So thank you!

If you want to continue getting weekly veggies, and haven’t already, please sign up for the fall CSA share now. If you aren’t doing the fall CSA share, but want to keep receiving weekly newsletters, you can use that sign up form, and just put a note in the comments such as “not doing the fall share, but want to receive the newsletter each week.”

Also, if you are willing to take about 5-10 minutes to give us feedback on your experience with the summer CSA program, click here. We value your input, and often make shifts in how we manage the farm based on information we here from you all. Thanks!

*fall greens in the field, arugula, spicy mix, mesclun mix,, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have leeks, brussels sprouts, spaghetti squash, delicata squash, butternut squash, broccoli, purple kohlrabi, red beets, yellow beets, chioggia (pink and white striped) beets, Ailsa Craig sweet onions, shallots, carrots, garlic, seed garlic*, green cabbage, red and yellow potatoes**, sweet peppers, poblano peppers, painted mountain flour corn, jalapeno peppers, serrano peppers, red and green napa cabbage, baby bok choi, salad turnips, green curly kale, lacinato kale, cilantro, arugula, baby lettuce, spinach, mesclun mix, pea shoots, spicy greens mix, baby kale, mini romaine lettuce, parsley, tomatillos, and husk cherries!

*Seed garlic is the same garlic that has been available for CSA, but we set aside the largest heads for seed: these larger cloves will grow bigger garlic than smaller ones. We generally plant our garlic seed around October 15th and mulch thickly with straw. We will have two varieties available: Music (4-6 huge cloves per head) and German Red (8-10 large cloves per head). Garlic can be planted as closely as 6 inches apart, but 12 inches apart will grow larger heads. If you select it on your order form and have a variety prefence, make that note in the comment section. (Or if you prefer purchasing a larger bulk amount of seed garlic instead of an item’s worth, the seed garlic is $14 per pound.)

**Sourced from Atlas Farm, certified organic.

*getting our garlic seed broken up and ready to plant, 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. 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!

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

Seed Garlic: $14 per pound (German Red and German White available)

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

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

CSA Bag Delivery Order Form

Fill out the delivery form by noon on Tuesdays.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

*Adam tooks so many awesome aerial photos this week… I love this one… Cuttingsville is so gorgeous, photo by Adam Ford*

Postcards for the Vermont Climate Council

A CSA member who is involved in the 350.org organization (a group working to address the climate crisis) has provided a stack of postcards for us to have in the barn if you want to add your voice to the efforts of supporting a just transition off fossil fuels. Candy says, “Would you like to do your part to influence the Vt. Climate Council to move forward with a Just Transition off fossil fuels? 350 VT is flooding the Council with postcards. Kara will have some at the barn for you to sign. No need to mail them; they will be returned to Candy in a few weeks, and delivered en mass. For more information, go to 350 Vt Just Transitions or email Candy @ Seajones55@yhoo.com.” We will set up an area in the barn where you can fill out a blank one, and leave your signed cards for us to turn back in if this initiative speaks to you.

Farm News from Kara

What a week it was! Ryan was busy managing the site work for the future solar/equipment shed. This was a project we put in motion awhile back, but kept having delays for various reasons. One purpose of this project is to have enough south facing roof space to install more solar panels to finally produce all the farm’s electricity with solar power. (The farm has grown and developed since our first solar installation, and we need to catch up to our consumption!) A portion of this project is funded by an award we received last year through NOFA-VT’s Farmer of the Month Award which “recognizes farmers whose businesses are contributing to a resilient Vermont agricultural landscape and demonstrate environmental stewardship through sustainable practices.” Seems fitting to use it to finally install all the solar power this farm needs.

The team also removed the old plastic from a high tunnel, and then reskinned it, and wrapped up all the loose ends of getting that plastic replaced. It’s a big project, and one of my favorite parts is watching people on the team step out of their comfort zone and learn new skills while working on an infrastructure project.

And the team also started doing some of the big fall harvests for storage veggies. Last year we forgot to plant storage kolhrabi, and many folks mentioned missing that last winter, but this year we will have glorious, sweet, crunchy, refreshing, large green storage winter kohlrabi during those cold gray months.

*Sorry, just cannot get enough of these drone shots.. this one is looking west… look at the gorgeous colors changing on the hills! photo by Adam Ford*

I am feeling a tremendous amount of gratitute for all the farm work that the team held down this week to allow me to participate in an immerisive training this week on anti-racism for folks who work with food and land. Many, many years ago I had the good fortune to participate in a 2-week residential anti-oppression training through the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a 100+ year old global peace network. This week’s training was through Service2Justice, and built on that training, but added so much more to my toolkit and lens of using food production as a means to achieve the future we all deserve. The past couple of years we have been exploring the history of this land as the unceded, ancestral homeland of the Abenaki, and wondering what our repsonsiblity as white, first generation, land owning farmers is. (Spoiler aleart, we don’t have an answer yet…. Learning more produces more queries to explore.) For a long time I have compartmentalized our work as farmers as imporant on its own, especially for the climate crisis. It’s so time consuming and draining to simply farm and produce food, and it’s been easy to silo the other ways we need to address a more just and safe world instead of embracing the intersectionality of all the imaginative work for the future. So this week’s training was a real gift to work with 37 other folks from around the country to re-imagine the ways our work as food producers is inherintly bound up with so many other social issues.

Why am I even sharing this with you all? Well, importantly, it’s Indigenous People’s Day on Monday, so it seems like a fitting newsletter to share this particular interest of ours. And also because I do a lot of “invisible” work here for the farm, and this is a big part of it…. and as much as I just want to tell you about how the bok choi is growing or how the cover crops are managing erosion (and I do love talking about that stuff!), it’s also an authentic reality that we think about broader issues as a farm as well. I’ll be motivated to share more detail around our process on anti-racism work within the context of food production and land management: I realize that isn’t everyone’s passion, so in future weeks, I will embed a clickable link to read about that portion of our work, instead of having that in the main newsletter.

Next week we will probably start planting garlic and continue harvesting certain crops for winter storage. Even though it’s been an above average warmer October, we have been enjoying the mild weather to keep a lot of things growing well in the field… and just crossing our fingers that when it does start getting cold, that it isn’t so abrupt that our winter greens haven’t had the ability to accilmate to their winter tundra.