Thanks for joining the Spring CSA season!

Especially if you are new try to read the information in this email.

*greens regrowing nicely through the winter, photo by Adam Ford*

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.

The first newsletter of each season is a LOT of verbose information. But it answers a lot of common questions, too!

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 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. Unless you email us with your payment plan, or set up a payment plan on the Farmigo dashboard, please pay for the entire season now. It saves us valuable farm work time to have payments at the beginning of the season or on a planned payment schedule. Thank you!

If you are able to pay with a check, e-check, cash, Venmo, or EBT, it saves us a considerable amount of money compared to card transactions. We know that it’s necessary for some folks to use a card, so don’t feel bad if you use that option. Thanks!

CSA Nuts and Bolts Reminders

At the barn… (this week only! next week’s newsletter will provide the directions for normal barn pickup operations)

***Due to mud season, this first week barn pickup folks will place a custom order using this link to pick up at Wally’s Corner (at the Olde Barn in the Cuttingsville Post Office parking lot, 5444 Route 103) on Wednesday or Thursday. That link will accept orders through noon on Tuesday. If you don’t get around to ordering before noon on Tuesday, send us an email with a list of the items you want packed for a delivered bag by 9am on Wednesday for a Wednesday pickup or by 9am on Thursday for a Thursday pickup. Reach out with any questions.

If you pick up in Rutland or Ludlow….

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.
If you miss the order window for your delivery day, you will get an automatic email asking if you want your veggies this week, with an explanation of how to let us know if you do want veggies. Do not feel bad if you get these reminder emails. (I assure you that if I had to remember to order veggies each week with my chaotic life, I would forget 85% of the time.) This auto email system works well for us to catch any “later” orders… we love getting you your veggies!
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.)
Substitutions: Very infrequently, we need to substitute a vegetable you ordered with a different one. If you like , 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. Otherwise we will take our best guess to substitute something you would like
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. If you are a Rutland member, the co-op is doing us a favor providing a pickup spot in their busy, small space, so if you can’t get your bag on the day it’s delivered, give them a call so they put it in their cooler overnight.

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. Similarly, if you get a packed bag, and it’s missing an item, please let us know, so we can make it up. Thanks!
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?! Only 30 recipes are visible under each season, so use that search function to find everything.
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!

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have garlic, leeks, green cabbage, yellow potatoes, red potatoes, carrots, watermelon radishes, daikon radishes, Gilfeather turnip, rutabaga, claytonia, mesclun mix, green curly kale, lacinato kale, baby kale mix, flowering baby bok choi*, and maybe some baby lettuce if we are lucky.

*A note about the flowering baby bok choi: This time of year the baby brassicas start flowering as the sun returns and the temperatures warm. So the bok choi grows more slender and begins forming flower buds that we find delicious and very similar to a tender broccoli raab. We use the entire plant when we cook with it, leaves, stem, and cute little flowering top. One of the joys of vegetable CSAs is that we have the capacity to harvest and distribute veggies at uncommon stages. If you like greens, you will still enjoy the flowering baby bok choi. It will only be available this week.

*this is what the flower baby bok choi looks like*

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag to Ludlow or Rutland

Ordering closes at noon on Tuesdays for Wednesday bags, and at midnight on Wednesdays for Friday bags.

Click here to order a customized bag delivered to Wally’s Corner if you normally pick up at the barn

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

If this is your first time ordering with the new platform, and have any trouble using it to order your veggies this week (or change your pickup location, or skip this week, or anything…) reach out to us. We are here to help.

Farm News

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

The first newsletter of a new CSA is always A LOT, so I try to keep the farm news section brief the first week.

The weather this past week has been an alternating spring and winter experience. As we continue into the future of an erratic climate, it continues to get trickier to manage food production. Plants get important signals from the predictable seasons they have been cultivated in for such a long time, so some of the quick dramatic changes in weather can make for more challenging conditions for farming. We feel slightly more insulated to that than certain farmers, for instance those who manage orchards or sugar operations, but it still does make certain planning and production tricky around here. Many of tunnel greens will be ready earlier this season which will change how we plan and plant for mid and later spring season greens. For example, normally we can harvest a few more weeks of bok choi before we start harvesting the flowering bok choi. But it’s all just part of the adaptability puzzle…. plant lots of different things at various times, observe the conditions within which they thrive, and plan for any number of weather patterns to cause changes in those plans. It’s just cool to get to work with these gorgeous, hardy, delicious, bright greens this time of year.

I remember the first time I was impressed with the level of joy growing winter and spring greens brought to me: We set up our first caterpillar tunnels, which are low moveable hoop structures, in Pennsylvania to use in the winter of 2009/2010, and we seeded most of it to mizuna. That first year was a bit of an experiment for ourselves as we started learning about winter growing. Onc very sunny February Saturday, I went out to check the tunnels, and I dug myself an entrance through the foot or so of snow to get under the bunched up plastic on the end of the tunnel, and crawled inside. Despite being unpleasantly cold outside, right under that single row of plastic, the sun warmed the space so it was comfortable to get rid of all my snow gear down to a t-shirt, and I just laid down between two rows of lush, bright green mizuna, and took a nap in the middle of the day, in the sunshine, in my t-shirt, in February. I loved looking at the dense stand of deep green, with the background of the feet of snow piled up against the plastic outside. I think that day sold me on growing winter greens. Even when I get annoyed at moving heavy row cover on and off greens in the winter, or bummed if chickweed chokes out a bed of greens, or a bit overwhelmed that the timing of harvests are adjusted by the erratic weather, I still feel grateful that we can even grow this stuff this time of year at all. It’s pretty cool.

These days we have been seeding the earliest seeds (tomatoes and peppers!), reseeding new beds to later spring greens in the tunnels, cleaning up storage crops, and getting our bigger seed starting area set up to start much more seeding this week. Ryan is busy finishing our seed inventory and putting the finishing touches on this year’s crop plan.

Have a great week,

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

Cabbage Poriyal