1st Week of the Spring CSA season: Week of March 1st

Feb 24

Thanks for joining the Spring CSA season!

The first newsletter of each season is a lot of verbose information. But it answers a lot of common questions, too. Try to read the information in this newsletter. (Or at least scan the big, bold headings of each section to see if they are topics you need information on.)

left to right: spinach, parsley/claytonia, newly seeded mesclun mix, red baby lettuce, green baby lettuce, different green baby lettuce, spinach all growing and ready to harvest in the Trunchbull, photo by Kara

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.

*Tokyo Bekana growing in the baby red kale bed, photo by Kara*

*rogue green mustard growing in the tat soi bed, photo by Kara*

CSA Balance Due

If you haven’t already paid, your balance is due this week. You can:

Pay online through your account with a card or e-check
Mail a check to Evening Song Farm at 48 Nice Road, Cuttingsville VT 05738
Send money with Venmo @eveningsongcsa (our profile has our logo pictured)
Email or call us to pay with EBT
Leave a check in the CSA cash box at the barn.

It’s very cool to pay in smaller chunks, just let us know what your payment plan is.

Important note: the new software system shuts off the ability for folks to order a delivered bag when payments are a couple weeks late.

The “balance” display on your CSA dashboard isn’t as intuitive as I would hope. If you have questions about your balance for the season at any point, just reach out.

*spinach bed waiting to be harvested, photo by Kara*

CSA Nuts and Bolts Reminders

At the barn….

If you pick out your veggies at the barn, CSA hours are Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9 am to 8 pm.
You do NOT need to put in a veggie order to pick out your own veggies at the barn. You just show up on Wednesday or Thursday and pick out what you want.
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.
You can buy extra items at the barn by leaving money in the cash box at the CSA sign in area.
If you pick up your veggies at the barn, you may also see some other products (maple syrup, bread, 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.)
To get to the barn, our address “48 Nice Road, Cuttingsville VT.” Then pull up to the barn, and go up the ramp, and the veggies will be displayed in the display cooler on your right.

If you order a bag for delivery….

Click on the button that will bring you to our Farmigo CSA store to place your weekly order.
Ordering closes at noon on Tuesdays for Wednesday bags and midnight on Wednesday for Friday bags.
You can change your pickup location and day any week by signing into your account: Find the “summary box” over to the right. Next to the Pickup/Change box, click on either “permanent,” if you want to change spots for the foreseeable future, or “next delivery” if the change is just for this week. Select the spot you want your bag to go to, and hit save. (If you just select “next delivery” the following week it will revert back to your original pickup site and day.) Click here for a quick video on how to change your pickup location or day.
If you want to skip a week and save those items for later, click on the “delivery hold” tab under “My account,” and enter the dates you will be skipping. Then choose a date you want to make up those items. When that week rolls around, the system will allow you to order double items. (If you need to change that makeup date, just email us, we are happy to make that change.) If you completely forget to order or put a hold on, one week, reach out to us with the date you want to make them up so we can manually put those items in for future access. Click here for a quick video on how to skip a CSA week.
NOTE: If you order a delivery bag, right now the software system can’t handle making up a couple items here or there: only all in one week unless you pick out your veggies yourself at the barn. If you can’t make up a week’s worth of missed items all at once, feel free to pick up your veggies from the barn for a couple weeks (without pre-ordering) and take a few extra each time. Just keep track of your missed items as you make them up. (If you have never been here, we are less than a mile off Route 103, on the way to Ludlow or Rutland…. so not terribly off the beaten path for an occasional trip.) Or you can mention in the comment of your order one week something like “please add 2 bags of lettuce for make up items.”
Substitutions: Use the comment section of the ordering to list a substitution preference you would enjoy being packed in case we don’t have one of the items that was ordered on the day we harvest/pack. We make the vegetable availability list for the newsletter almost a week earlier on our best guess of what will be ready to harvest by the time your delivery day rolls around, and many environmental factors throw those best guesses out the window sometimes! If you don’t mention a preferred substitution, and we aren’t able to harvest something that we thought would be available, we will substitute something we think is a “greatest hit” and enjoyed by most folks. We have been handwriting on each bag when a substitution occurs so folks don’t think their bag was mispacked, but we will eventually phase that step out of handwriting substitutions.
You can buy extra items or bulk items when you put in your normal (pre-paid) weekly order. Click on the “veggie store” and “bulk” lines on the left of the store to purchase additional items.
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 just fine for a few hours out of a cooler, but it’s best to pick them up that day instead of letting them continue to sit out overnight.
Please make sure the bag you take from the delivery spot has your correct first and last name. We have over 200 CSA members in the spring season, and some names look similar if you are grabbing a bag quickly.
The CSA software system we use sends out several automatic reminders, and sometimes they are confusing. Email us if you ever have a question.
If you don’t place an order one week, and you havne’t put a “hold” on your account to schedule them for later, you will get an auto email from us asking if you actually want to still place an order for this week. Don’t feel bad about being “late” ordering veggies: we love getting veggies to people, and this automatic reminder system works well for us.

For every CSA member…

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 bigger issues. And we also love if you make up that bad veggie in future weeks. (If you order a delivered bag, put a note in the comment such as “adding an extra item of lettuce for a bad leek item last week.”) Our goal is that you get wonderful food each week.
If you feel like you need to adjust your share size, you can either do that yourself on the Farmigo account, or reach out to us, and we can do it for you. Our theme is flexibility, and we love when it works for you to get veggies this way.
Did you know….. that all the weekly recipes are stored and searchable by veggie or season here?!
If you are totally new, or just have questions, check out this CSA guidelines page to answer more questions, or just reach out to us!

*washed out bins drying outside the wash station, photo by Adam Ford*

*sunshine over a tunnel on a cold day, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have spinach, green curly kale bunches, claytonia, mesclun mix, parsley, red beets, yellow beets, chioggia beets, carrots, onions, daikon radishes, green cabbage, watermelon radish, kohlrabi, and red and yellow potatoes.

*carrots, onions, and beets are now sourced from Juniper Hill Farm, also certified organic

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 Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

*beautiful rainbow chard leaf, photo by Adam Ford*

*zoomed out, less pretty rainbow chard patch, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

(Farm news is all bonus content, no essential information in this section)

This was a long newsletter already just getting all the information out there for the season, so we will keep this week’s farm update brief:

Our winter break always feels like it flies by….. we put way more projects on our to do lists than we actually had time for, but it was still a nice time for us to be able to focus our energy on other projects. Some of the things we have been working on are an additional walk in cooler in the barn, improving the CSA pickup space in the barn (not done yet!), improving our heat setup in the propagation house, switching the walk in cooler in the root cellar to our grow room for the seed starting season, and several other odds and ends. We also found some time to enjoy winter with our kiddos.

These weeks are full of seed starting, removing old plantings from certain beds in the tunnels to seed greens to be ready for later in the spring CSA season. (Last week we started the first tomato seeds!) During February and some of March, we start all our seeds in a grow room in the root cellar (that is usually a cooler for the rest of the year). This time of year we get the larger propagation house set up, to be ready to turn on the hot water bench system in there to be able to move our seedling production out from the small (10’x12’) grow room into the expanses of that 30’ x 68’ space. This week, we will spend time in there getting the tables ready to receive plants, and getting row cover ready to keep those tender tables warm. The biggest change in the prop house this year will be the addition of some air heat from a pellet furnace. For our entire operation we have only used hot water to heat little tubes that are coiled on top of the table to heat the soil of the plants, with layers of plastic and row cover over those tables to keep them cozy, and some backup tiny electric space heaters under those covers during the coldest nights for the most frost sensitive plants. We have never heated the rest of the air of the propagation house, because we have considered it a big, consumptive waste if we can make these micro greenhouses on the tables with less energy. It’s worked well enough, obviously, but it causes some amount of sleepless nights wondering if we are going to lose all the tenderest plants. We have NEVER met a single other production farm who operates their seed starting greenhouse without supplemental air heat. So the time has come for us to prioritize those anxious nights, and also potentially grow better seedlings, by adding a pellet furnace into that space. We will still run it Kara and Ryan style: at absolutely the bare minimum we can get by with, and a much chillier greenhouse than most operations, but we are excited to see if our plant babies come out better this year. We have been suspecting that our consistently poor production of peppers and eggplant year after year could maybe, maybe, maybe be related to the fact that they start off their delicate young lives in a much cooler environment than they should be in. Fingers crossed we get to experience some tangible improvements this year from the addition of this heat! We will at least enjoy not getting all the alerts on our phone overnight of the prop house getting too cold!

Also this year, we are going to reach out to our larger CSA community more for specific needs when they arise: First up for this year is that we have to replace our delivery van. We wish we could get by with a pickup truck with a cap or a mini van, but we need a cargo van due to the size of the deliveries we do in the summer season. If you (or someone you know) are selling a cargo van that drives and doesn’t have rust underneath, we are in the market for one.

Have a great week,

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