2nd Week of the Fall CSA Season: Week of November 6th

Nov 2

Written By Evening Song Farm

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, spinach, arugula, green curly kale, lacinato kale bunches, bok choi, green cabbage, Napa cabbage, pea shoots, and brussels sprouts
Roots: carrots, yellow potatoes, rutabaga, red beets, yellow beets, chioggia beets, watermelon radish, daikon radish, Gilfeather turnip, parsnips
Alliums: onions, garlic, shallots, and leeks
Fruiting Crops: delicata squash and butternut squash
Herbs and Miscellaneous: fennel and Painted Mountain corn

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

*who am I? half chioggia, half yellow beet? photo by Kara*

Farm News

This week we tucked in the onion sets for an overwintered early spring onion harvest. Last year that was a successful experiment, but it was also a mild winter. It's possible that a winter with colder low temperatures and less snow cover could have different results…fingers crossed they will grow well this year, but either way we’ll learn a little more about overwintering onion plants for earlier harvest.

We also planted all the garlic and got it mulched. Just in the 14 years we have been running Evening Song Farm, we have pushed our garlic planting date back by around two weeks. We want to get it in the ground so it gets good root establishment before the winter, but not too early that the tender green shoots of the garlic plants emerge from the mulched soil before they go dormant for the winter. With the warming autumns, we have found the need to push that planting date back to keep that emergence from happening before spring. So late October/early November is our current goal, and we nailed it this week.

We also continued grooving on all the fall storage harvest… finishing up the beets, rutabaga, and Gilfeather turnip. Next week we will be working on getting into storage our cabbage, leeks, and brussels sprouts.

My brother, Bryan, hopped on a train to NYC this weekend to head back to Colombia for the winter. It’s such a gift that he has spent such a big chunk of his time up here working on this farm, while putting his own farmstead on pause in the jungle. It’s a real treat to have him on the team, and wish him well with his tropical winter projects.

Ryan heads out to Maine this weekend for the Farmer to Farmer conference hosted by MOFGA, Maine Organic Farmer and Gardener Association, to present on reduced tillage techniques for soil health and climate adaptation. It’s a privilege to put all our experimentation and research into a coherent workshop to share some of the insights, flops, successes, learning moments, and future experiments with other farmers who are also working through this lens of future resilient food systems.

Have a great week!

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

Baked Parmesan Fennel