1st Week of the Summer CSA: June 1-4
Thanks for joining the Summer CSA Share! We look forward to a fresh and tasty summer of great veggies.
The first week’s newsletter of each CSA season is always dense, but has useful information, updates on specifics for this season, and answers to common questions.
How To Use This Newsletter
Each week, usually in this order, the newsletter will have:
A list of the vegetables available
A button to click if you’d like to have your items packed and delivered
A button to click for a reminder of the different pickup and delivery options each week
Any random reminders or information
Farm news
Weekly recipe
We understand life can be busy and chaotic— it is for us!— so we keep the important information near the top in case you can’t read a newsletter each week. The farm news and recipes are just bonus content if you want to know more about what goes on here.
If you are totally new to our CSA, start by reading this brief explanation of how to get veggies each week. If you still have questions, give us a call or email and we’ll make sure you know how it works.
cucumber growing in the tunnel, photo by Adam Ford
CSA Nuts and Bolts Reminders
At the barn….
If you pick out your veggies at the barn, CSA hours are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 9 am to 8 pm during the summer share.
If you prefer less traffic at the barn when you pick up, you may be interested to know that Wednesdays (especially between 3 pm and 6 pm) are the busiest times at the farm for CSA pickup. We are constantly re-harvesting and restocking the display cooler so Tuesdays and Thursdays are also great days here.
If you pick up your veggies at the barn, you may also see some other products (maple syrup, eggs, bread, flowers, and certified organic grass-fed beef) from neighbor farms. You can purchase those items as extras, and leave payment in the cash box at pickup. These aren’t interchangeable with CSA veggie items. (If you use a check you can still make it out to Evening Song Farm.)
We are currently still suggesting only one household in the barn at a time selecting veggies, but since the barn is essentially an outdoor space, and Vermont has such a high vaccination rate, we are no longer requiring masks. (For clarity, our farm team still wears masks in the wash station and walk in cooler.)
If you order a bag for delivery….
If you miss the order form window for a delivered bag any week, send us an email, and we will confirm that we added it to the packing list. We LOVE when people actually get their veggies, and we are happy to hear from you. It’s hard to remember to order “on time” every week, and we get that!
If you pick up your bag at one of the delivery spots, just keep in mind that they aren’t stored in a cooler after we drop them off. The veggies keep well because they are either inside or in full shade, but it’s best to pick them up that day instead of letting them continue to sit out overnight when we get to the hotter part of the season.
For every CSA member…
If you miss a week of veggies, feel free to make that up whenever you want. We just ask that you keep track of your makeup items yourself.
We appreciate hearing from you if you ever get a bad veggie or it goes bad faster than expected. We learn from it, and it helps us catch issues that may be more than just your veggie. And we also love if you make up that bad veggie in future weeks. Our goal is that you get wonderful food each week, so you shouldn’t ever be stuck with a bad veggie.
If you feel like you need to adjust your share size, let us know. Our theme is flexibility, and we love when it works for you to get veggies this way.
baby arugula in the field
Woohoo, you made it through all the dense details for the start of the season! Now it’s just information about this week!
This Week’s Availability
This week we will have red potatoes, fingerling potatoes, baby lettuce, mesclun mix, spicy salad mix, scallions, pea shoots, radishes, baby bok choi, salad turnips, arugula, cilantro, baby kale, rhubarb, and head lettuce.
If you pick up your veggies at the barn, there will also be lots of plants (veggies, herbs, flowers, and melons) that you can choose as CSA items as well. If you normally get your CSA veggies delivered using the order form below, but are interested in getting some plants as CSA items, consider visiting the farm to pick out your items this week instead of ordering a normal delivery bag. We are also hosting a plant sale this Sunday, May 30th from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm if you want to just purchase plants instead of grabbing some as CSA items. The CSA pickup hours at the barn are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 9 am to 8 pm during the summer share.
If you are coming to the farm to pick out your veggies from the display cooler, you don’t need to use the order form below.
Fill out the delivery form by noon on Tuesdays.
A couple weeks ago, Taylor discovered a little bird’s nest with eggs hidden in the radishes while we were harvesting: Cindy identified them as White-throated Sparrows. We left a healthy amount of radishes in the ground around the nest to give them time to hatch. And this week these little cuties were down there under the tiny radish canopy that was left behind. Organic certification requires implementing strategies to encourage biodiversity throughout the farm, and these adorable champions feel like they just gave us a check plus on that category.
CSA Balance Due
Payment for your summer CSA share is due this week unless you need a different payment plan. (And please reach out to us if you need a different payment plan, we are happy to do that.) You can mail a check to Evening Song Farm, 48 Nice Road, Cuttingsville, VT 05738, leave cash or check in the box at the barn, use this link to pay online, or call or email us to pay with EBT.
The goats got out of their fence one morning this week, and our front door was apparently left open. Ryan came into our house to this site of Bella just hanging out inside, with our confused dogs in the corner… Thanks for the visit, Bella!
Farm News
(optional reading… this is just for folks who like to know a bit about what goes on around here)
Welcome to the summer CSA season! Last week we were hustling around trying to transplant all the things…… basil, eggplant, husk cherries, tomatillos, celeriac, brassicas, leeks, parsley, another round of beets, and the last planting of later tomatoes. There is still more to catch up on, so this week we plan to tuck in everything else that is eager to get into the field. We also got the field of winter squash seeded and row covered, the team slammed out the trellising of over 300 cucumber plants, and we spent so many days packing 132 individual plant orders for people’s home gardens. Morgan had the excellent idea of compiling pictures of people’s gorgeous summer gardens, and then feature them in a newsletter later this summer. Keep an eye out for a request for garden pictures in a couple months if you want to show off your joy!
The recent rain has been welcomed. We minimally irrigate around here... Only when it’s needed after transplanting, or if an especially dry spell might make certain crops struggle. It is a lot of work to set up irrigation systems, dragging lines, attaching sprinklers, hoses, fittings, then maybe finding out there is a leak somewhere, fixing that, maybe more than once, and then doing it all over again in another field. So we love when the rain comes to skip all those steps for us.
Many of you are new to us, and maybe some of you have been getting your veggies from us since 2011…. either way, we got help overhauling our website this year, and one of my favorite parts of the new website is the page about all the incredible farmers that work here. It’s weird for us not to be at farmers’ market anymore to meet you all face to face, and get to chat, talk about veggies and your families, so if you are the type of person who likes to get to know their farmer, check out the mini bios on everyone who works here. We can’t say enough great things about everyone who chooses to be on this team…. we are lucky such great people find their way here.
This week we hope to keep trellising the tomatoes before they get too unruly. We hope to be able to squeeze in some weeding projects that would set us up for better success in a couple weeks, and we will keep on getting all the transplants in the ground.
Have a great week!
-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, Molly, Cindy, Grace, Sam, Taylor, Morgan, and Katie
We are trying out a zone of permanent beds with permanent mulched pathways. The straw we used to mulch the paths had some rye seed in it, so we are just letting the rye in the pathways grow full size before mowing it onto the pathways for an extra layer of mulch.
Weekly Recipe
We are still working on adding all the historical recipes from years of past newsletter into our recipe index. But if you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s a neat function where you can search by veggie, season, or word. For instance, if you saw something in a past newsletter you wanted to try, like “Garlic Yogurt Dressing,” you can type “yogurt” or “dressing” into the search bar to find some great options. This week’s recipe can be accessed in the button below.
Full disclosure: I don’t like radishes. (It’s true, veggie farmers sometimes don’t like everything we grow! Weird but accurate.) When we started farming, we had to rely on eating what we grew: there wasn’t much in our budget to enjoy out of season foods. So those first few years were ones that cultivated a strong sense of creativity and utilitarianism between the garden and the kitchen. This led me to master transforming things I don’t really care for into delightful and nourishing meals. And this radish recipe is still something I enjoy! So if you generally don’t like radishes either, maybe give this one a try one day.