*greens 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, 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.

If you get an auto email about a balance due, either pay that, or reach out if you think it’s wrong. It helps reduce our computer work load if payments are taken care of when a notice goes out. Thanks!

This Week’s Availability

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

*Is claytonia new to you? It’s a tender, sweet, mild green with long delightful stems, and smooth, small green leaves. It’s excellent added to a green salad, or as a nice green crunch in a sandwich. They look like overgrown micro greens, and I am personally not into stem-y greens, but I really enjoy the stems on claytonia!

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

This week the team finished all the garlic planting and then mulched one of the fields. Straw mulching is excellent for the soil and weed suppression, but a bit of an annoying job for the humans. It’s pokey, itchy and finds its way into all our clothes somehow, and it’s no longer something I can personally do after developing a dust allergy years ago, so I am grateful to our team for tackling this particular job. But the mulching is done for the season!

We spent the day on Tuesday putting several layers of row cover on all the outdoor greens we want to save and keep harvesting from, as well as a first cover layer on the greens in the tunnel. With this totally enjoyable (but somewhat frightening) warm November weather, we had a 50+ degree swing in temperature in about 2-3 days, and that’s really hard for the winter greens to handle. Even super hardy plants like lacinato kale have been totally zapped by a cold night if they haven’t gradually acclimated from the warm season to the cold season. So we row covered some things that wouldn’t normally have gotten covered because of the abrupt temperature change. Row covering is also an un-coveted job around the farm: a necessity for any type of season extension and spray-free insect control… but kind of a pain to wrestle with giant pieces of heavy, often damp fabric, especially on the windy days that come with a big temperature shift. But I feel like I haven’t done my fair share of row covering around here in a while, so I took a break from my office work and helped cover many of the tender greens. (We joke that working together to row cover can test a marriage: moving the heavy rolls around, unrolling to find out there are large rips making it unusable, getting it all twisted up as it unrolls, hauling heavy and ripping sandbags around the fields to hold the fabric down, losing the sandbags under a first layer of cover, battling large hoops into the ground, having the wind yank it all off a previously covered field, debating if brussels sprouts can handle this particular temperature swing or if you have to cover ANOTHER field, etc…. and it was a delight to find out that after a day of row covering outdoor greens, that our marriage is doing well. Ha… perhaps you will pick up on the taste of the terroir of the next several weeks of fresh greens are of happily married farmers. Or at least of farmers that didn’t have to row cover in driving rain or snow!)

Cindy and Ryan keep working away at replacing end walls on the tunnels. The team continues to bulk harvest different winter storage crops. We need the cold weather to be able to start pulling cold air into the root cellar before we bulk harvest certain crops like all the Napa cabbage. We have big vents with thermostats and fans on each vent to pull the cold fall and winter air into the root cellar to keep most of the crops at the temperature we need to good winter storage. So we normally have to wait until it is consistently cold enough to harvest everything in for the season.

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

Parmesan Napa and Kale

If you are dairy free, there is a little description in the recipe above to make an alternative flavor profile, that is also delicious, and very different that the parmesan base version.