*one of the brussels sprouts fields with an excellent cover crop understory, 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!

This Week’s Availability

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

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

The team harvested, washed, and stored all the rutabaga, Gilfeather turnip, and cabbage that was still in the field last week. Ryan got the experimental overwintered onions tucked with with straw mulch and ash bark mulch. And this week we will start doing the bulk storage harvest of the rest of the leeks and brussels sprouts that are in the field.

It was time to button up the wash station this week, to keep that work space a little warmer for us and the veggies. So the sides went up, and the wood stove moved in. We all really appreciate how most of the season, the wash station is almost an outdoor space, without walls. On harvest days we can spend a lot of time in there…. I have visited farms whose wash stations are completely enclosed, often in windowless spaces, which make for much more cozy wash stations in the fall and winter, but much less bright and sunshiny during the rest of the season. That’s why we have opted for the extra task or putting up and taking down our greenhouse plastic walls on the structure each fall and spring. Sometimes having a little extra work two times a year, to make a daily time consuming task happen in an ideal space is worth it.

Ryan attended a weekend workshop a month ago to learn about managing a farm our size as a fully no-till operation. We have explored different management methods for low- and no-till growing, especially the super fun, effective ways that Ryan has been growing different cover crops as living mulches or as mulches in place for various crops. But we still grow some crops with the use of more soil disturbance than we want, especially for growing baby greens. Before this particular workshop, we have really only been exposed to no-till growing practices on a very small scale, so it was incredibly inspiring to see an operation that is almost our size making it work. We started acquiring some materials (such as wood chips and bark mulch) that would be needed to start transitioning some zones to entirely no-till. It will be cool to choose zones that we will start shifting to those management practices this winter and fall.

Next week I will be presenting at the annual Farm to Plate conference, as part of a panel discussing climate messaging for farms. It’s always great to get to be in a room with other people in the farm and food world to discuss really anything honestly. Sometimes I can get overwhelmed at the amount of “invisible work” (as I call it) that I do as part of my farm work, that keeps me from doing as much in-the-dirt farm work on my own farm. But when I get to see the ways that some of my indoor work participates in the bigger parts of our regional food system, it feels a bit more worth it. It also helps me stay grounded as a farmer to make sure I am involving myself in bigger projects…. after all, I started farming as a way to engage with climate work, not just have delicious veggies to work with in my kitchen.

Have a great week,

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

Kale and Brussels Sprouts with Bacon