5th Week of the Fall CSA season: Week of November 23rd

Nov 19

Written By Evening Song Farm

THANKSGIVING WEEK PICKUP ADJUSTMENTS

If you normally pick up in Rutland on Fridays, your pickup day will automatically be moved to Wednesday this week since the co-op is closed on Friday. Reach out to us if you prefer picking up at the barn this week. (Ludlow bags will still be delivered on Wednesday and Friday this week.)

For this holiday weekly only: Barn pickup hours will be TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY this week. (We will leave the display cooler stocked on Thursday in case anyone forgets and needs their veggies that day.)

*baby lettuce, bok choi, claytonia, parsley, spinach 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!

*watermelon and daikon radish, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have 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, 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!

Veggie highlight: Kohlrabi! Do you ever feel uncomfortably full on Thanksgiving? We try to include enough fresh and light veggie options to help all the gravy and stuffing sit a little easier after a day of feasting. Consider highlighting kohlrabi at your Thanksgiving table this year: Peel the outer skin off, and cut up into nice thin slices like carrot sticks for an appetizer. Dip into hummus or a yogurt-based ranch dip. (Mix yogurt with dill, oregano, basil, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and a splash of maple syrup. Kohlrabi sticks and yogurt ranch is one of our kids’ favorite snacks and side dishes.) Want it warm for the main meal? Slice peeled kohlrabi into 1/4 to 1/2 in rounds, and roast with olive oil, salt, and lemon juice. I also boil and mash it up with the mashed potatoes for a lighter, sweeter variation on mashed potatoes. Want to go real wild? Does your family rely on green bean casserole for Thanksgiving, but your inner local foodie from being a CSA member is like “Wait! Green beans aren’t harvested in Vermont this time of year!” If so, slice kohlrabi into green bean sized logs, and use in place of green beans in your favorite green bean casserole recipe. This will be different. It’s not like green beans. but it’s real good. And it’ll be on our table next week. This week’s recipe below is another warm kohlrabi side dish that is great for Thanksgiving.

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

*still harvesting brussels sprouts from the field, photo by Adam Ford*

*finding lots of bowls of ice on these chilly harvest mornings, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week the team finished mulching the final garlic field. And we bulk harvested the winter storage kohlrabi, green cabbage, napa cabbage, and a chunk of the brussels sprouts. We are still able to harvest brussels sprouts and leeks from the field for a little longer, but soon we will get everything else that is outside into storage for the winter. It makes our cooler management completely wild to pull in such a huge volume of veggies at once, but it’s a dance we have been used to for a long time now! Starting this week all the greens will be harvested from inside the tunnels. This week’s nighttime lows were too much for the rest of the field greens. We are just grateful we got to harvest from outside as long as we did this season.

This time of year requires a lot of attention to weather forecasts to plan harvest days. The greens we grow in the high tunnels during the late fall and winter and super hardy to withstand very low temperatures (with the help of 3 layers of heavy duty row cover, and a double layer of inflated plastic on the tunnels.) They freeze solid under all that protection, and to harvest, we have to wait until the sun warms up the tunnels enough to defrost the leaves before harvesting. That means sometimes, if we have nights in the teens, with a projected cloudy day the next day that doesn’t get about the 20s, we actually aren’t able to harvest anything since the leaves won’t defrost on a cold cloudy day. Sometimes that means there is only a small window of harvestability this time of year.

Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, especially as a farmer. It is really fun to have a loaded table full of culinary delights that are almost exclusively from the farm. We often roast a chicken that we grazed on these fields, grind the grain corn we grew for bread and some special savory corn and kale appetizer balls that are somewhere between hush puppies and falafel and dipped in a tangy cilantro sauce, and of course so many veggie side dishes. We are incredibly lucky to eat this well, and the holiday is a time for me to slow down my brain, and eat with the consciousness that all this hard work is delicious. We also carry the tension of the complicated origins of American Thanksgiving, and if you enjoy working on decolonizing your holidays as well, here’s a fun read for one perspective on bringing awareness to that. Holding the duality of enjoying a holiday that my family adores to celebrate food and togetherness alongside the brutal history of indigenous eradication in this country is a work in progress, but one that we find worth holding.

And my last thought this week is honoring the passing of a phenomenal Shrewsbury community member and long time volunteer and board member of the Vermont Farmers’ Food Center. The VFFC shared it best in their tribute to her beautiful life. I will add the anecdote of our first interaction with Lisa and her family, which was after we lost our farm from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011: Our community held us up and organized a beautiful fundraiser celebration on our moon scape of a farm a month or so after the storm, including a robust silent auction to raise rebuilding funds. As usually happens at larger silent auctions, not everything was getting bid on, but I think she and her family went around and pretty much bid on anything that wasn’t getting snatched up….. because in the weeks that followed as I connected auction winners to their items, their name kept popping up for MANY won items. It really made an impression on me: that this family that I hadn’t yet met in person was so invested in our farm’s ability to rebuild, that they likely bid on several items they really didn’t have an interest in taking home! I was lucky to get to know Lisa a bit more over the years, and will never forget her infectious smile, calm listening skills, passion for community, and overall warmth. Being a CSA farm, we get to meet and create relationships with such a large number of amazing people. And as is a hard reality of being a human, we also lose those bright lights along the way as well. Thank you, Lisa (and family), for everything, including your dedication and support of this region’s local food shed.

We hope everyone who celebrates the holiday has a warm, relaxing, delicious Thanksgiving,

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