*field of carrots for winter storage, 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, yellow potatoes, red potatoes, mesclun mix, green napa cabbage, celery, baby kale, baby lettuce, arugula, baby bok choi, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, garlic, husk cherries, Carmen sweet red peppers, green sweet Carmen peppers, poblano peppers, jalapeño peppers, green serrano peppers, green tomatoes, tomatillos, shallots, leeks, carrots, plum tomatoes, Painted Mountain grain corn, mini Romaine heads, green and red head lettuce, and delicata squash.

If you do any bulk preserving, now is a great time to snag roma paste tomatoes ($2.90/pound.) We also have jalapenos (or serranos, both $6/pound) in bulk if you use any for fermenting, hot sauce, pickled jalapenos, jalapeno jelly, or whatever! If you are inspired to preserve any sweet green Carmen peppers ($2/pound) for the winter, now is a good time for that as well. (We slice and freeze them, dry them, and roast and puree them into a sauce for the freezer.) Send us an email if we should put anything aside for you.

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

Here’s a cool community event: the 2023 Farm to Film Fest, held this year on October 21st in White River Junction from 9 am to 10 pm. There will be short and feature length films about the farm and food world, a delicious lunch and dinner, family activities for kids, a square dance, and a meet and greet with climate farmers that have been involved in the climate messaging cohort I have written about throughout this season. It’s a sliding scale event from $0-$40, so all are welcome.

We finally have the fall CSA season sign ups available online! It took us awhile to get that set up because we were going back and forth on our season length decision… Usually we have the fall CSA share run to the middle of January, because we have the winter greens volume still growing, and the storage crops in good supply. But the logistics that are required to make a CSA schedule work in January and February makes our brains spin a little bit: As the winter weather settles in, we can only harvest greens when they are defrosted, which generally means a sunny day, because the sun can usually defrost the greens in the ground in the tunnels by about 10am on a sunny enough day. But if we get stretches of gray days, which we do, it’s just not possible. (For example, when we have a CSA setup and delivery day on Wednesday, but Monday and Tuesday are gray and 20 degrees… we have to work some herculean magic to access the greens.) There is so much we have to defrost and keep warm on a harvest and wash day, that its significantly easier to plan around the weather versus a CSA schedule during the coldest months. So despite CSA being our absolute favorite way to sell veggies for various reasons (meaningful connections with CSA members, supportive/reliable customer base, reliability to eager eaters, you all are just great people, etc), we have started feeling like shortening the fall CSA season, and planning a large harvest day to wholesale greens on any sunny days in January and February will be a little easier on our management brains. (Turns out our management brains feel capable of less since becoming parents….) So, after the fall CSA ends, you can find our greens at any of the retail places that we wholesale to: the Rutland Co-op (in Rutland), Pierce’s Store (in Shrewsbury), Plew Farm stand (in Mount Holly), Squire Family Farm Stand (in Tinmouth), and Singleton’s (in Cavendish) until the spring CSA starts up in March.

Last week we got the first jump on harvesting some of the winter storage carrots, and they are looking (and tasting) good! Ryan drives a big digging bar deep under the carrots to loosen the soil, then the team pulls them all, tops them, hauls them into the wash area, and sends them through the barrel washer to clean them before storage. Many more rows to go, and then we will dive into the rest of the winter storage crops.

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

Parmesan Napa and Kale