*Vanessa sending watermelon radishes through the root washer (I just love how the reflections of the magenta of Vanessa’s shirt and the radishes blend together), photo by Galen Miller*

CSA Balance Due

If you haven’t already paid, your balance is due this week. You can pay online through your account, mail a check to Evening Song Farm 48 Nice Road, Cuttingsville VT 05738, or 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. You can also email or call us to pay with EBT.

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.

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have husk cherries, shallots, celery, leeks, fall kohlrabi, cilantro, baby lettuce, mini lettuce heads, spinach, baby bok choi, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, red beets, yellow beets, carrots, garlic, yellow onions, purple and white daikon radishes, baby kale, mesclun mix, spicy greens, green napa cabbage, serrano peppers, watermelon radish, salad turnips, broccoli, brussels sprouts, brussels tops*, celeriac**, green cabbage, and red and yellow potatoes.

*Brussel tops (versus brussels sprouts) are the loose, larger brussels that didn’t head up yet. They are delightful, taste the same as brussels sprouts, and are excellent if you are making a shredded brussels sprout salad or hash. (This is one of those cool veggies that is only going to be available from a local farm: they don’t have a commercial following yet to make it viable for larger farms to do anything with them besides compost them.)

**Notes on celeriac: First off, what is it? Celeriac is a root vegetable that tastes like celery. It can be used raw (think like a carrot stick to dips, shredded into salads, sliced on sandwiches) and cooked (add to mashed potatoes, roast in rounds with olive oil and lemon juice). But the most important thing to note that it is SO HARD to sort out celeriac for quality control. Even perfectly beautiful ones sometimes harbor some bad spots inside that we just cannot detect from looking at the outside. We debated just not offering them at all this season since we can’t tell based on the outside, but they are just such a fun veggie, so unique, and not really commercially available, so we decided to sort as well as we can and list them for you all to choose. If you order them for a packed bag, we will automatically be sending more than an item’s worth in anticipation that you will have to cut some parts out. If you get a lot of celeriac with bad spots inside, please make up those items in future weeks, by either taking an item while you are at the barn, or making a comment on your order form that you are making up an item for bad celeriac. Our advanced apologies if you get a bad root, but we are aware of the annoying situation. (If you are curious about the source of this problem, it’s water: Celeriac needs consistent water to grow without those bad spots developing inside. With how dry this summer was, it was just not possible to provide the consistent water it needed as it grew… we were hoping for better results than we seem to have with this harvest, but there are enough good ones in the mix that it seems worth it to give it a shot.)

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

Farm News

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

This week we planted one field of garlic: 6,000 cloves planted, with 6,000 left to plant! Normally we plant two garlic cloves per square foot. This year we experimented giving the largest cloves twice as much space in an attempt to grow larger seed stock. We were really happy with the quality of our seed this year, but it will be neat to see if the extra spacing improves the size of the garlic that will be next year’s seed. Next week we will plant the second field and start the big project of mulching it all.

The team also harvested all of the larger patch of winter storage watermelon radishes. It’s a big project: hours in the field harvesting, removing the greens, washing, packing, and storing hundreds of pounds of watermelon radishes, but they are such a delightful magenta addition to winter eating. We have all our beets harvested and stashed away for the winter, and the next big harvesting project on the list will be our fall carrots. It’s unusual to have such fair weather as we head into November, but it makes it so much easier for us to make it through the big list of fall projects.

One personal highlight this fall has been the opportunity to participate in our school’s Four Winds program: a nature education program in which volunteers receive a monthly training, and then present a lesson to a class at our Shrewsbury Mountain School. This month’s lesson was on seeds. With the Kindergarden/1st grade class, we dissected burdock seed pods, looked at milkweed seeds with a hand lens, and walked along the unmowed edges of the school property searching for different types of seeds waiting to be dispersed by animals, wind, or gravity. But the highlight of this lesson was seeing the fascination of the 5 and 6 year olds as they looked at scarlet runner bean seeds, soaked a few days apart to show them at different stages in their development. The class got to see the progression of the bean seed pushing out a little rootlet, then a more developed root with lateral branches, and finally a leaf emerging from the top. They were so engaged at seeing the next steps in that magical process of transformation! Having planted millions of seeds over the past 11 years at Evening Song Farm, it was a special joy to get to see young minds of our town be so fully amazed at life growing again from a seed.

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

Kohlrabi Fries

This week’s recipe was written for the summer-sized kohlrabi: the winter variety that is available this week is much larger, so you probably only need to use 1 head, versus 2 like the recipe states.