Thanks for joining the Summer CSA season!

Especially if you are new, or a returning summer member who hasn’t been doing the winter/spring season with us, try to read the information in this email.

*looking down at the farm from above the tunnel field, 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 Venom @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 card, so don’t feel bad if you have to use that option. Thanks!

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.
You do NOT need to put in a veggie order to pick out your own veggies at the barn. You just show up on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and pick out what you want.
If you ever want to order a bag for delivery one week instead of coming to the barn, just shoot us an email so we can change your ordering capacity on the software platform, and then you are good to go!
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 on the right, 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.
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 rememebr to order veggies each week with my chaotic life, I would forget 80% 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: 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 universally enjoyed by folks.
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 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 red radish bunches, salad turnips, baby lettuce, cilantro, mini Romaine heads, red oakleaf lettuce heads, green oakleaf lettuce heads, baby bok choi, spinach, mescun mix, pea shoots, rhubarb, garlic, winter chioggia beets, fresh oregano bunches, scallions, yellow potatoes, and the last of the plant starts we have for your garden.

This will be the last week we will put plants out for CSA items at the barn. We have too wide of a plant inventory to manage all of it on the online ordering platform (there are a few plants listed), so if you are interested in plants as CSA items, this is a good week to pick your weekly veggies up at the farm. We still have several tomato varieties, peppers, herbs, greens, flowers, zucchini, winter squash, brassicas, etc.

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

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.

*pea shoot patch… the spot in the foreground will be cut next week, the patch in the middle was just cut for last week, and the patch in the background is for this week, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

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

The team continues to transplant everything we have time to transplant. And we are keeping up relatively well with weeding, and even trellising all the cucumber and tomato plants. Bryan worked on getting up the pea trellis, and started building the roof overhang extension over the new ramp built this spring. Ryan keeps prepping fields for transplant and cover crop preparation. Katie keeps direct seeding our weekly greens plantings, and Molly has taken on the roll of managing a lot of the field preparation that requires the BCS walk behind tractor. And we got the last of the 120+plant pre-orders out the door last week.

This week, we hope to finish most of the main season transplanting, and hopefully get in the pick your own flower garden. We really love and look forward to sharing that pick your own flower garden with you all later this season. My mom shared her copy of Braiding Sweetgrass (by Robin Wall Kimmerer), and if you haven’t read it yet, I strongly recommend it. It’s a book packed with beautiful plant knowledge woven together between scientific and Indigenous perspectives. A section in the beginning of the book expands on the beauty of a gift economy, and it resonates with who I was at the outset of becoming a farmer. There are many things that drew me to farming, but trading you delightful gifts from our gardens for money was not one of them. This money exchange is a necessary part of running a long term sustainable farm business that can support the lives of the incredible team of farmers here, and to provide food for the community long into the future, but in my fantasy land, where money isn’t a central part of functioning in society, the gifts of the earth that we grow could just be shared. Since that isn’t the world we live in, we love the pick your own flower garden, to fill that need that we have, alongside the vegetable business that is the foundation of this farm. The flower garden is just a gorgeous little space to grow flowers and herbs for everyone to enjoy, sit in, pick from, take something special home, draw, oggle, whatever, that isn’t a part of our veggie business. It’s a space to share the beauty, joy, and bounty of the earth with the larger community that is keeping this farm going by buying seasonal vegetables. So thanks for your support, and to thank yourselves, take a visit to the flower garden later this season.

Have a great week,

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

For this week's recipe, I want to draw your attention to our recipe page: Click this button to access all the recipes we have posted in the past several years. You can search by season, vegetable, or word. For instance, if you remember enjoying a particular salad dressing recipe from a previous newsletter, type in the word “dressing” and explore what pops up! Next week will return to posting a new weekly recipe.