*Look at these awesome farmers! K2, Bryan, Vanessa, Taylor, Molly are half of the folks who make this food possible…. missing from this pic are Galen, Katie, Cindy, Ryan, and Kara, photo by Adam Ford*

CSA Balance Due

If you haven’t already paid, your balance is due. 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.

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have red radish bunches, salad turnips, fresh yellow beets with greens, fresh red beets with greens, fresh carrots with tops, baby kale, parsley, mini romaine lettuce heads, garlic scapes, green cabbage, rainbow chard, baby lettuce, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, baby bok choi, spinach, rhubarb, winter chioggia beets, fresh oregano bunches, cilantro, scallions, cucumbers, zucchini, broccolini, and purple kohlrabi.

What is kohlrabi? Great question… It’s a weird looking veggie, but super yummy. Peel off the thick outer skin, and the inside is sweet, crunchy, and has a flavor like a broccoli stem. Our kids love it chopped up like carrot sticks to dip with. Grate it fresh over green salads. Use your air fryer to make kohlrabi fries. Roast them, grill them, mash them, pickle them, really whatever.

What are garlic scapes? They are also kind funny looking, and make great bracelets for a fashion statement piece this time of year, or to ward off vampires. Raw, they have a wonderful, strong, fresh garlic taste. We love making fresh scape pesto with them, (and also this carrot top/garlic scape pesto), as well as sauteing or grilling them. I blend them into anything this time of year: hummus, pasta sauces, omelet fillings, salad dressings, etc.

This is a great time of year to really enjoy cucumbers… last week we harvested almost 600 pounds! Check out the fresh pickle recipe at the bottom of this week’s newsletter. They go so fast in this house! Or make some cucumber lemonade!

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 Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Farm News

Last week we had to play catch up on pruning and trellising, but now the tomatoes are looking good on their strings. I really enjoy trellising and pruning tomatoes, creating a certain type of tidiness and order with such a chaotic and wild plant. We were behind enough that some of the main growing stems on the cherry tomatoes snapped under their own weight as we tried to lift them off the ground. But what’s fun about the wildness of tomatoes, is that they are always putting an unreasonable amount of “suckers” out between the main stem and leaf branches…. so when a growing stem snapped, we can steal a new growing tip from an adjacent tomato and clip it onto the string from the severed plant, so that we don’t have an empty tomato space in the row.

We have a big amount of weeding to play catch up on this week, but that’s also one of my favorite field projects. Again, getting to force some type of order and tidiness amidst the chaos and success of eager plants growing wildly in the heat of a rainy summer.

Most things are growing nicely so far this season. It’s early to make such optimistic observations, but it’s also true, and fun to share when things are going well. It’s really been amazing to see how amazing the cucumber plants are doing this year, thanks to the investment in the insect netting on the sides of the tunnels. I didn’t realize how much stress the cucumber beetles put on the plants and affect their marketable yield. We are considering scaling back the number of plants we grow next year because it seems like protecting them from cucumber beetles is incredibly effective at increasing yields.

One challenge has been the volume of aphids that are present on the tomato plants so far. Aphids are a challenge for a few reasons, and we usually manage them by releasing weekly batches of parasitic insects to keep their population down. Because the aphids overwinter on our winter greens, their population started pretty high this spring, and we probably should have sprayed an organic spray to set back their numbers. But by the time we made that assessment, we had a box of bumblebees in the tunnel to help with pollination, and we just didn’t want to spray anything that could affect our bumblebee pals. Bumblebees will move on soon, and then we do a round of aphid control to hopefully set their population back. It’s such a fine dance of controlling the insects we don’t want present, and the ones we do. There are plenty of garden pests we have to manage and contend with, but there are actually plenty more that we want to live and thrive here.

The pick-your-own flower garden won’t be really ready with flowers for another several weeks when the annuals start blooming, but there are a few eager, early flowers that are showing themselves off in that space these days. If you pick up at the barn, you are more than welcome to walk around it and pick what you see. In a few weeks when there is enough for folks to pick wildly, we will put a sign at CSA pickup, and also label the herbs in the pick-your-own area so you know what is there. Until then, it’s a bit of a subdued mystery if you poke around in there.

The past few weeks I have been using the newsletter to share information about the climate cohort I am participating in. I wrote about the research consolidated by Action Circles about the current public narratives around farms and climate change, and the first two new message frame they created to get new narratives about farming as climate work into the world. There are several other new message frames I will write about in future newsletter but this week and next week are especially busy weeks for me, so I am doing a short pause on writing about them in the newsletter. For all of you who have shared your interest in reading about this topic, don’t worry, I will jump back in soon!

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

Refrigerator Pickles