*baby lettuce cut for the week in the middle rows, spinach and baby romaine heads on either side, 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.

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!

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, rainbow chard, parsley, red beets, yellow beets, carrots, garlic, yellow onions, purple and white daikon radishes, baby kale, mesclun mix, green napa cabbage, watermelon radish, salad turnips, celeriac, green cabbage, and red and yellow potatoes.

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

This week Ryan and the team did a lot of field cleanup to store supplies for the winter. And they also planted a bunch of bulbs in the flower garden and mulched it for over winter. We have been really enjoying the pick your own flower garden, and hope to expand the season of pickable flowers with some bulbs over time.

So… the brussels sprout situation…. If you haven’t taken or ordered brussels sprouts, perhaps you aren’t aware of the issue we have this year: Last week some folks let us know they got brussels sprouts with discolored leaves inside (thank you!!), and when we took a sampling from the field and cut them open to see how pervasive the issue was, we were really bummed to find it in most of the brussels sprouts. It seems like this is likely cold damage from a 12 degree night. This is a bummer for several reasons. One reason is that based on the varieties we grow, and the consensus among veggie farmers around the region, and our own experience, brussels sprouts should be field hardy to single digits before harvest. So this damage was a surprise to us. It’s also a bummer because farming is hard, and sometimes feels like a series of the hard toe stubs, over and over. Veggies can be hard to grow. There are so many little things you have to do correctly and well throughout a sesaon to have a successful, marketable veggie available. You can do all those steps correctly. (All 800 of of them, it feels like.) And then you can have one 12 degree night, and your fields of brussels sprouts are ruined. And then you kick yourself for not just getting them harvested into the root cellar the day before. (Though it really wasn’t possible this year with everything we had to squeeze in the day before.) In years past we have had brussels sprouts flop from the mis-timing of seeding or transplanting, from pest pressure that stunts their growth, from weed pressure, from too much water that makes fertility unavailable, from too little water for growth, from aphid infestation that has layers and layers of aphids in each leaf, from fungal disease that makes the leaves black and gross, and sometimes just from the veggie gods that feel like playing a prank of us. So this year, we were obviously PUMPED that they were seeded on time, that no chipmunks ate the seedlings in the prop house before transplanting, that the transplanting was on time, that the wind didn’t kick up after transplanting and snap their stems, that row cover didn’t lay on them on a hot day and burn their baby leaves, and they had just the right amount of water to get established, that we maintained adequate moisture throughout a dry season, that they stayed weeded and free of fungal diseases…. We grew about 1/4 acre of brussels sprouts on two totally different locations on the farm to hedge our bets against all the issues mentioned, and they both looked DIVINE. And they were… for the first couple of weeks.

Anyway, going forward we are going to have brussels sprouts available at CSA pickup as a free, bonus item to take as much as you want. They have a layer of brown leaves on the inside. You can cut those out and enjoy delicious brussels sprouts. Or you can just cook them as is, and you won’t notice a thing: there is no off flavor, and once they are cooked and lightly browned, you can’t tell the discoloration is there. It certainly looks gross and disappointing when you cut into them fresh, which is why we don’t want to pass them out as a real item. Or you can just avoid them, which is totally understandable and legit, if you don’t want sub-par veggies. But if you love brussels sprouts (like us) and you are kind of scrappy (like us), feel free to take what you want. We are eating them every day right now, since we imagine we have a lot to go through… And our favorite way to eat them is to heat olive oil in a pan and add about 8 whole cloves of garlic and lightly brown each side of the garlic. Meanwhile, we cut a panful of brussels sprouts in half (we don’t bother removing those brown leaves because we are always too busy and have 2 high energy little kids wanting all our attention), and then we toss them in the garlic olive oil pan, and sauté until they lightly brown. We add some salt and butter to the pan, and then enjoy buttery, garlicky brussels sprouts.

Besides our brussels sprouts heartbreak, all is well over here. Cindy and Ryan keep wrapping up infrastructure projects, the team keeps harvesting and packing out veggie orders, and believe it or not, we are already diving into our 2023 seed order.

Have a great week,

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