3rd Week of the Fall CSA season: Week of November 8th

Nov 4

*mini green lettuce heads, 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 have to use that option. Thanks!

*kale field in the snow, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow beets, red beets, yellow potatoes, red potatoes, mesclun mix, baby kale, baby lettuce, arugula, baby bok choi, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, garlic, seed garlic, poblano peppers, jalapeño peppers, green serrano peppers, shallots, leeks, carrots, Painted Mountain grain corn, brussels sprouts, watermelon radish, daikon radish, spinach, endive, mini red lettuce heads, mini green lettuce heads, Romaine heads, broccoli, green cabbage, rutabaga, and Gilfeather turnip.

If you do any bulk preserving, now is a great time to snag jalapenos or serranos, (both $6/pound) in bulk if you use any for fermenting, hot sauce, pickled jalapenos, jalapeno jelly, or whatever! Send us an email if we should put anything aside for you.

If you are looking for seed garlic for your garden, we have German Red and German White seed garlic available for $12/pound. Reach out if you want any.

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

*Galen washing daikon radish in the root washer… just the other day I wondered how many rotations the barrel on this washer makes each fall… photo by Adam Ford*

*ah the time of year when we need to drain hoses daily….one of the benefits of being a hilly farm. photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

Woohoo! All the garlic is planted and mulched! That’s always a satisfying feeling in the fall to have that project completed. Then we turned our attention to continuing the big bulk fall harvest of storage veggies. Still to go on our list include rutabaga, Gilfeather turnip, leeks, cabbage and brussels sprouts. If you are surprised that we store and send out pallets worth of some of the “weird” storage veggies, so are we, I guess. It’s very cool that there is demand for these hearty, nutritious, flavorful, fun storage veggies. One of my favorite ways to use those less common roots (watermelon radish, daikon, rutabaga, and Gilfeather) in the winter is as savory waffles…. Think of potato pancakes, but instead of potatoes, use a blend of those veggies, shredded, and cooked in a waffle iron for breakfast. So good! Or just add a few of them to your mashed potatoes for a great flavor and nutrition addition.

I often say that veggie farming in the fall is a little bit harder than winter farming. In the winter we have to defrost things on harvest and wash days, plow snow everywhere, including around all the tunnels so the sides can keep shedding throughout the winter, manage heavy, wet, cold row cover on and off greens every day in the tunnels, and many other somewhat annoying aspects to winter production. But the grace of winter farming, is that we are done harvesting outside… it’s all inside, protected from the wind and rain or snow, with some extra warmth if the sun is shining. In the fall, we are still harvesting greens and other veggies from under rows covers, and sometimes through snow, and it’s cold and wet, and hard to do with gloves effectively. The weather continues to trend towards winter this time of year, but the greenhouse harvesting doesn’t catch up as quick with the weather, so the shoulder season provides plenty of time to have less pleasant outdoor work days. So thank goodness for hardy, incredible, upbeat farmers who just do a great job of accepting the weather conditions and raising the music on the field speaker, and making it through the colder outdoor harvests this time of year. When you enjoy some of your spinach this week, just imagine some totally cool (probably woman) farmer on this team who kept their spirits high enough during harvest to get this stuff to the wash station and out the door! (That’s what I imagine when I cook with the greens this time of year.)

Next week we will continue all the bulk storage harvests and then start to catch up on the weeding in the tunnels.

Have a great week,

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

Pink Cornbread