*green curly kale in the tunnel, photo by Adam Ford*

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!

Barn CSA pickup is back to normal!

Thanks for everyone’s patience and flexibility with last week’s change due to mud season. As a reminder, here are normal barn pickup protocols.

If you pick out your veggies at the barn, CSA hours are 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 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.

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, spinach, and baby lettuce.

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.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Farm News

Last week we set up the grow room and got a good jump on the loads of spring seeding we do this time of year. Our grow room is an insulated room in the root cellar that gets used for many purposes at different times of the year. In the spring and summer, it stores all of our farm’s vegetable seed and cover crop seed at a cool and dry temperature. In early fall, we move out the seeds and use a dehumidifier to create a warm and dry environment for drying down grain corn. Then in late fall the corn is moved out and a modified air conditioner drops the temperature to the mid 30’s, and we fill the room up with carrots, turnips, beets, and radishes for the winter. And now this time of year the room has been emptied of many of the storage veggies and the remaining veggies have been moved to cold storage on the first floor of the barn. We put a grow light and a heater in the now empty space, and we have trays of tomatoes, peppers, beets, and herbs in that multi-functional space. Even though it takes a little work to regularly empty and re-purpose that space, it feels good to utilize it for so many functions throughout the year, and the regular turnover prevents clutter from building up. Very shortly Cindy and Ryan will do some maintenance and repairs on the heating infrastructure in our seedling greenhouse, and we will start many dozen trays of onions, leeks, shallots, and other seeds in there. In the meantime, it’s nice to have a small space where we can grow a few trays of early seedlings without having to heat an entire 30’ x 68’ greenhouse.

In addition to the seeds that we have planted in trays in our grow room, we also have some dormant hardwood cuttings that we are rooting in trays. This is one of my favorite ways to propagate plants: this time of year before the buds have begun to open, cuttings 6-10 inches long are taken from species that are suited to this type of propagation. So far, we’ve rooted cuttings from two varieties of willow, two varieties of elderberry, and two varieties of black locust. This is the first time I’ve tried to propagate locust from hardwood cuttings, so we’ll see how it goes. The willow and elderberry root quite easily this way, and these woody shrubs are available through our spring plant sale. They are good plants for supporting pollinator and beneficial insect populations, and the willow variety "“Packing Twine” (salix purpurea) produces beautiful long straight stems that can be used for basket making. I’ve never learned how to make willow baskets but I think it would be fun to learn someday. I do like to use those willow stems for making the base of a flower crown. Each year for Kara’s birthday I’ll make her a crown, using willow stems to make the frame and filling it in with the early May flowers.

We hope you all enjoyed the veggies you got last week and we look forward to seeing many of you back at the barn!

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

Kale Chips