*peas climbing their trellis, 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, 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.

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have radishes, red beets with greens, yellow beets with greens, salad turnips, pea shoots, baby arugula, baby lettuce, spinach, baby bok choi, scallions, fresh oregano bunches, cilantro, mini romaine head lettuce, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, rainbow chard bunches, zucchini, cucumbers, strawberries, carrots with tops, and frozen heirloom/beefsteak tomatoes.

If you order a bag for delivery, make sure you list a preferred substitute for zucchini or cucumbers. The first week they start producing it’s a complete guess how many will be ready, but soon we will be swimming in them!

This is likely the last week of strawberries: they have slowed down dramatically, so we are back to limiting them to 1 pint per share.

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 Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

If you have any trouble using it to order your veggies this week (or change your pickup location, or skip this week, or anything…) reach out to us. We are here to help.

New “Did you know?” section in the newsletter!

We thought that it would be fun to have a new (small) section in the newsletter each week for a random piece of CSA information. We have an FAQ page on our website, as well as a description of how each share type works (barn versus delivered shares), and we are always happy to answer questions, but there is so much to know about CSA, that it might be helpful to put random “did you know”s in the newsletter each week. This week’s:

Our theme is flexibility: you can change your pickup location week to week (including between the barn and a delivered site), you can change your share size mid-season, and you can make up missed items at a different time (by either keeping track of what you miss and coming to the barn, or by putting a “hold” on your dashboard and selecting the date you want to make them up.)

Farm News from Kara

I had a lovely chat with a member at the barn this week about how her hearing about how we are behind on spring work made her feel like she wasn’t a bad gardener. I mentioned how we try to keep the newsletters from being too heavy on the “oof, this is hard, we are stressed, farming is draining” theme, because we do love what we do, and feel very lucky to have such a well supported farm by the community. But she shared with me how it’s all that realness, the peaking into what this work entails, that she really appreciates, so I assured her I will pepper these newsletters with plenty of our reality, hoping you all know that these reflections aren’t complaints… just a window into what we juggle as farmers:

Late May into June is a challenging time! If crops aren’t planted on time, they might not yield well, or at all. If things don’t get weeded on time, they might get overtaken by weeds or rodents from the delightful housing we provide around a food source. If things don’t get trellised on time, they get too out of hand to harvest or yield well. If things don’t get seeded on time, we have a break from certain crops later in the season, or even nothing at all. (For instance there is only a small window to plant fall crops, such as Napa cabbage or rutabaga, for them to size up on time before the shortening day light hours keep them from getting big enough for harvest.) And if this time of year is the “busy season,” August/September is the burnout season. We pack so much into a northeast growing season, that by the time August hits, we generally feel some level of depletion. But we can’t really catch our breath then, because August and September is the time of year to get all the tunnel greens seeded and transplanted to be able to have a successful winter greens harvest. Packing so much in to a short season is tough! This year we’re working at

So if you are also a gardener, and feel “behind” or overwhelmed at your garden, you are in good company.

AND there is so much to delight in this time of year: We put on head lamps after the kids’ bedtime to plant our home flower garden around the house, and it’s such nice, peaceful parent time, doing something we enjoy, in the quiet of the evening, sometimes getting to enjoy the early evening barred owl hoots behind the house. I love seeing the progression of seasonal flowers this time of year, and appreciating the early ones who hold spaces of color until the abundant transplanted annuals make their mid summer splash. I love eating all the “farmer” strawberries, right from the field.. the overripe ones, the slug bitten ones, they are all a bit sweeter (literally), and very worth enjoying. I enjoy walking in the tomato jungle and anticipating the excitement for the first tomato, basil, mozzarella sandwiches… this time of year our goats produce more milk since they are on pasture, and I take advantage of all that to make lots of fresh mozzarella in anticipation of some late July sandwiches. I also like seeing how good everything is growing. Usually this time of year, there aren’t many total crop failures yet, so this time of year feels like we rock at farming. (Except eggplant… eggplant is always breaking our heart. Not sure why the eggplant gods have cursed our ability to produce eggplant, but it’s looking like again, for perhaps a decade straight, we put AMAZING transplants, of several varieties, in the ground, and then they fail. We are totally stumped. Again. But I digress, because everything else looks awesome.) And I love just getting to work with such a great crew of awesome, thorough, effective, kind, funny farmers. Can’t beat having a great crew to work with.

This week will probably be the last harvest of strawberries—availability will be limited again. This will help us have more time to catch up with other work we are behind on.. my breakfast strawberry/whipped cream habit will be sad to see them go, but our to do list will be pumped.

Have a great week,

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

Kale Fritters