4th Week of the Summer CSA seson: Week of June 28th
Cucumber baby fruit and tendril, photo by Adam Ford
We love garlic scape season…sauteed, roasted, grilled, blended into paste or garlic scape pesto, photo by Adam Ford
Leek seedlings ready to transplant, photo by Adam Ford
CSA Balance Due
If you haven’t already paid, your balance is due. 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.
Cindy makes the place look sharp! photo by Adam Ford
Taylor and Galen harvesting lacinato kale, photo by Adam Ford
The robins and cedar waxwings found our strawberry patch towards the end of the season, so we needed to put our bird netting over the strawberries. photo by Adam Ford
Our original rhubarb patch becomes a pretty wild zone when the harvest winds down. Milkweed overtakes the area in early summer, which we leave in for the butterflies and its beautiful fragrant flowers. photo by Ryan
This Week’s Availability
This week we will have garlic scapes, purple kohlrabi, basil, parsley, 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, broccolini, cucumbers, fresh carrots.
If you order a bag for delivery, make sure you list a preferred substitute for broccolini: This is a crop that is really hard to predict what we be available on any given day. We have to harvest the tender florets at a precise time, and it’s not easy to predict volumes the way we can with other crops this far out from a harvest day.
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.
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.
Katie spraying beet bunches photo by Adam Ford
Tomato plants look great. Photo by Ryan Fitzbeauchamp
Did you know?
Tuesday is a slow and mellow day for picking out your items at the barn…Wednesday and Thursday tend to be busier. (Barn pickup hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 9 am to 8 pm.)
So much strawberry harvest happening, but not much weed management happening, photo by Ryan Fitzbeauchamp
The open field, photo by Ryan Fitzbeauchamp
Farm News from Ryan
Thank you, strawberries! Last week wrapped up our final harvest for the year. It was only our second year growing strawberries, and based on what we learned growing them last year, we made some changes. This year’s strawberries were planted a little earlier, and we applied a little organic fertilizer in the spring. And then, we got walloped by strawberries! We had no idea how many berries our 1/10 acre patch would produce, and how much time we would need to spend picking them all. We’ll miss the intensely delightful treats of the early summer, but our crouched over aching bodies will welcome the reprieve from strawberry harvest. Now that we’ve gotten accustomed to endless hours in the strawberry patch, it will be a wonderful treat to be able to use that time for other tasks.
One of our joys this past week was—finally—planting the pick-your-own flower garden next to the barn. Like our experience with strawberries, this is only our second year growing an annual flower cutting garden for CSA members to enjoy and harvest on pickup days. And also like the strawberries, we made a few changes. The garden space is bigger with a different layout, and we included some interesting pick-your-own herbs for anyone who is interested in experimenting with some new and different flavors, as well as an edible flower patch, and some special lunchbox snack peppers to pick and eat! In the early mornings while our kids were still asleep, I had fun building some arch structures out of willow sticks for vining flowers to climb over. In just a few weeks, this garden will be a real treat to walk through and pick as many flowers as you or your children like. Last year one of our biggest joys of the season was seeing how happy it made people to walk though and harvest from a such a wild symphony of flowers. In the meantime, when you’re here picking up your veggies, feel free to take a walk through the pathways to see the little seedlings in the earlier stages of their growth.
Wishing everyone a beautiful week,
ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, Molly, Katie, K2, Taylor, Vanessa, Galen, and, Cindy
A view of the flower garden from the cupola. Photo by Ryan Fitzbeauchamp
We celebrated Vanessa’s 29th birthday with 29 different flavors of cupcakes!!
Some baby birds, perhaps sparrows, recently hatched, photo by Kara Fitzbeauchamp
Ryan checking out a bin of spinach. Photo by Adam Ford
Sunday’s fierce winds blew some of our freshly planted flower seedlings right out of the ground! In our early years farming it would have caused us a lot of stress. These days, we stick them back in and turn the sprinklers back on. Photo by Ryan Fitzbeauchamp
An extra thought from Kara this week….
It’s hard to focus on my daily responsibilities of running the farm (like sending out this weekly newsletter) as if nothing is going on around us… and Friday’s (unsurprising, but still jarring) court decision to radically restrict reproductive health care access in our country is hard to stomach. I like our newsletter being a window into the farm, so you can have as much of an understanding of how your food is grown as possible, and maybe even a little reprieve from all the hard news of the day. And this farm is also run by a crew that is majority (8/9ths) women (as I wish the Supreme Court was), and this hurts… to feel like our bodies are not our own to care for. So to all the other folks who are feeling rage, despair, and a sense of curiosity of exactly what century we are living in, I’m there with you.