This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow onions, red onions, red beets, carrots, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, fingerling potatoes, watermelon radish, sweet potatoes, mesclun mix, spinach, green curly kale, chard, baby kale mix, baby lettuce, and parsley.

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.

CSA Bag Delivery Order Form

Fill out the delivery form by noon on Tuesdays.

Note for Ludlow deliveries: You will continue to get your bag from Knight Tubs for this week of the spring CSA. Starting April 7th, the Ludlow pickup location will be on the side porch of the Okemo Mountain School.

Need a reminder where all the CSA pickup and delivery day and time options are? Click the button below.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

*a little scallion emerging interplanted among the winter spinach… these will be ready much later this spring, photo by Adam Ford*

Planning a garden for the summer?

Are you planning a summer garden? We grow certified organic herb, flower, vegetable, and some fruit starts for your garden. Click below for our online plant sales to pre-order spring plants for your garden.

Order Garden Starts

CSA Balance Due

Payment for your spring CSA share is due 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.

Farm News

(Optional bonus reading)

I hope the first week of spring CSA veggie acquisition went well for everyone! Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions, if anything is confusing.

This week Ryan peeled back the landscape fabric (that covered last year’s winter squash patch) from the first (and driest) garden area to do this season’s inaugural outdoor seeding of salad mixes, bok choi, broccoli raab, radishes, salad turnips, arugula, and carrots. He prepped the soil with a light pass of the power harrow, which is an alternative to beating up the soil with a rototiller. The power harrow is an improvement on the design of a rototiller...it stirs the top 1-2 inches of the soil, without disturbing the deeper layers. Then he amends the soil based on our annual soil tests, and pushes the seeder back and forth, for what feels like a zillion times. Here’s a fun fact… In that section alone that he planted this week, he walked over 2 1/2 miles just pushing the seeder! Wild! Sure, there are other types of seeding equipment that would require walking a shorter distance than over 2 1/2 miles in a space equivalent to only about a fifth of an acre, but for several reasons, that’s not the systems we have developed. This farm balances in a fun space where some activities resemble something that a much bigger farm might do, and some activities are clearly in small farm territory. We grow A LOT of baby greens throughout the year, in quick fast successions to hopefully have fresh, bright greens, nearly year round, and the precision that we are going for with the many different types of fast growing greens we grow, just does so much better with our push Jang seeder than tractor equipment. Just last week we harvested and sent out about 250 pounds of greens, so that Jang seeder is working hard for us.

Cindy, Grace, and Molly got a jump on building the new greenhouse tables for when we put the greenhouse extension on, hopefully in just a couple weeks. They busted out 11 tables like an inspiring assembly line that was a real treasure to have our daughter watch in awe. Our friend, Mary Jo (of Blume Vermont) and her partner did us the favor of taking down an old high tunnel frame that we purchased with them, and brought over our section of it. If you aren’t familiar with Mary Jo’s flower operation in Clarendon, check it out. (She runs a flower CSA program.) She is a very skilled flower grower with a heart of gold, and we love seeing her farm grow.

We are soaking and seeding new plantings of pea shoots in rapid succession as space opens up in the high tunnel. This week we will be harvesting the first baby lettuce of the spring!! Baby lettuce is my favorite salad mix we grow, so I am personally very excited.

Ryan built a little shelf area to the left of the display cooler in the barn to have a “better” spot for the CSA sign in and money box that won’t get rained on during rainy days. (Can’t believe it took us years to think of moving it, but here we are!) That area will also have all the items available from neighbor farms for extra purchase. We look forward to having that entire other table open for when the summer bounty comes along. Usually we are really struggling for display space with all the different veggies by that point.

Our neighbor Podge, (who runs Caravan Gardens with Martha… the sweet farm stand on 103) came over last week with his sawmill to mill up some lumber from trees Ryan took down for various projects we are tackling. It was excellent “TV” for our kiddos to get to watch, and just a delight to have such a local source of building materials. There was one hiccup on a log from a tree Ryan took down by a stone wall. Turned out buried deep within the bottom of the tree were nails, hammered in many decades ago and long since swallowed up by the growing tree. Needless to say, Podge’s sawblade didn’t appreciate the surprise nails. We learned that if we’re ever milling lumber from trees growing along old stone walls, we’ll use the bottom 6 feet of the tree for firewood.

We also seeded about 60 trays of more baby plants: beets, eggplant, head lettuce, kale... And we started potting up the earliest tomatoes to their next size up to continue thriving. That means they will be moved out of our cozy, warm, small grow room in the root cellar, into the more exposed, slightly riskier propagation house space. Let the weeks of crossing our fingers for only seasonably low night time temperatures begin! (I’m looking at next Thursday night with hopes it’ll change it’s mind on being in the teens.….)

Have a great week!

-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, Molly, Cindy, Grace, Sam, Taylor, and Katie

The garden in the foreground has a gorgeous cover crop holding the soil in place, capturing carbon, and feeding the soil microorganisms. The gardens in the background are covered with landscape fabric to hold soil in place overwinter since they were… — The garden in the foreground has a gorgeous cover crop holding the soil in place, capturing carbon, and feeding the soil microorganisms. The gardens in the background are covered with landscape fabric to hold soil in place overwinter since they were harvested too late last season to establish a cover crop. The snow hasn’t fully melted from these fields yet. Photo by Adam Ford

Weekly Recipe

We’re working on creating a recipe index on this site so that you can easily search and browse the recipes that we share. Eventually all the historical recipes will be there. Below is the button for this week’s featured recipe for kale falafel.

Get The Recipe