*Hi! My name is Sophie! I am incredibly cute, and fun to snuggle with. If you pick up your veggies at the barn, feel free to come say hi, I love new friends! 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!

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have garlic, green cabbage, yellow potatoes, carrots, beets, yellow onions, daikon radishes, sweet potatoes, Gilfeather turnip, rutabaga, claytonia, mesclun mix, green curly baby kale mix, spinach, and baby lettuce.

*In the spring we supplement our farm’s freshly harvested greens and storage vegetables with some extra storage crops sourced from other organic farms. Beets, onions, potatoes, and sweet potatoes are sourced from Juniper Hill Farm, on the other side of Lake Champlain. We’re lucky to be able to partner with some larger scale organic farms in the region to help strenghen our region’s ability to grow our own food.

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

This big snow reminds us that spring is the most hilarious season. It gets to be whatever it wants to be at any time. It makes it extra gratifying that Ryan was able to sneak that early outdoor seeding in the ground before the snow storm a couple weekends ago, because the fields may stay wet for awhile now after all this snow, making it hard to get to an outdoor seeding for a bit.

This week the team seeded thousands of onions, leeks, and shallots, and potted up tomatoes and peppers that all needed bigger homes as they bust out of their first trays. I particularly love repotting tomato plants: The smell of tomato plants transports me to the future summer months, and I love looking at all the tiny hairs on the tomato stems, imagining each of those that get buried when I repot them becoming roots in the plant’s extensive root system. The propagation house always fills up fast this time of year, and amazes us that we got by in a smaller space until last year. Two summers ago, after the seed starting part of the season, we extended that structure by 16 feet, adding 480 square feet of growing space, and now we still feel like we are busting out of that space!

More tunnel beds were prepped with compost and composted ash bark as Ryan dives into some no-till bed plans for the tunnels this season. It’s more work to prepare a bed, but one of the hopes is that all this mulch material can reduce our weeding work load in the future. Ryan also used the cold snap to harvest and skid some trees for next year’s firewood and some lumber we need for some projects.

And the cutest thing around here continues to be a new baby goat. It’s especially fun to watch the (human) kids run right into the pen after school to score some soft little snuggles. Goats have always been a hobby versus part of our farm business, but they still feel like an important part of the whole little ecosystem here. They enjoy a lot of plant debris that we remove from beds, and we use their composted bed pack in our compost piles. I have enjoyed watching the grasses change and pastures improve where we have been grazing them for the past decade+. They also just keep me grounded to have these sweet characters to tend to every morning… it’s nice to have something on our farm that I take care of regularly, that I am not trying to move at the most efficient pace with. I enjoy milking a goat every morning, and our family loves having access to goat milk since it’s not really commercially available. I joke that my fantasy farm is one where we produce goat yogurt and raspberries… two of the best delights that get alchemized from the earth. (I joke and it’s a fantasy, because I can’t wrap my business planning brain around the economics of a micro dairy or a highly perishable fruit susceptible to the spotted wing drosophila, a pest new to our region in the past decade or so.) So since we continue to just be a veggie farm, our little goat hobby scratches that itch enough.

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

Savory Waffles