*Our new half Nigerian Dwarf half Alpine goat, Noel, 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 have to use that option. Thanks!

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have red beets, yellow potatoes, red potatoes, baby kale, claytonia*, Tokyo Bekana**, baby lettuce, pea shoots, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, garlic, shallots, leeks, carrots, baby carrots, Painted Mountain grain corn, brussels sprouts, watermelon radish, daikon radish, spinach, mini red lettuce heads, mini green lettuce heads, green cabbage, rutabaga, yellow onions, and Gilfeather turnip.

*Claytonia is a tender, smooth, baby green, also known as “miner’s lettuce.” It’s used in salads, on sandwiches, wraps, and our kids just eat it by the handful as a snack. It has a long, crisp stem that is delicious. I personally dislike when greens are stemmy… except claytonia. I really enjoy the textural addition of claytonia stems.

**Is Tokyo Bekana new to you? If you have had the mesclun mix, it’s the tender light green leaf in that mix. It’s a mild salad green that some folks enjoy outside the mesclun mix. Use it like lettuce in a salad or or sandwiches.

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

Well, I forgot to plug this for actual Giving Tuesday, but better late than never, right? Throughout the year we participate in NOFA’s Farm Share program which provides CSA shares for families at a 25%-75% discount. Depending on the season, we have about 12-25 families participating in this program through our CSA, and having spoken with many of these families directly, I know how much of an impact subsidized fresh, local, organic veggies has for their families. NOFA has done an unbelievable job securing funds for this great program, and there is still always a wait list with more demand than funds, so they also ask participating farms to let our community know about the opportunity to support this program. If you feel called to make a tax- deductible donation to the NOFA Farm Share program, use this link, scroll down to “Farm Share Fund,” and make sure when you make a donation to indicate that it’s for families who get a CSA share from Evening Song Farm. (If you prefer your donation just going to the overhead for their entire program, that is totally fine, too. Just know that if you want it to support families who use this CSA program, it has to be noted in the donation.) Thank you!

This week felt like repair week… Which I guess happens throughout the year, but two that we tackled this week were not on the schedule ahead of time… they just showed up and needed to be dealt with now instead of going on the work calendar for the future. Ryan replaced a frost free hydrant in the propagation house. We can’t figure out how it exactly broke, but Ryan pointed out that when we were setting up all the infrastructure projects at once in 2012 after moving up here after Irene, that we really didn’t know much, ha! We were 27 years old with minimal experience with things like setting up underground water lines and plumbing for greenhouses, and all the other things…And our budget dictated that we did the majority of the work ourselves, and only hired out what we absolutely could not figure out. That said, the broken part of the frost free hydrant was a broken brass fitting 4 feet deep in the ground at the base of the hydrant…perhaps a manufacturing defect rather than installer error. So honestly, sometimes we are surprised that nearly 12 years later we don’t have more random issues like this pop up. But after lots of digging, muddy clothes, and a little bit of grumbling at brass fittings, the water to the propagation house is repaired, woohoo!

The other repair adventure was making our winter goat paddock fence a couple feet higher to keep our new (escape artist) goat contained. Don’t ask me what my plans are for spring, summer, and fall, when we move our goats around every week onto new grass pastures with mobile 4-ft electric net fencing, because I have about 5 months to find a fencing company sells a 6-ft version of what we use. (Spoiler alert, I haven’t found that company yet!) Our new goat, Noel, is incredibly sweet, and one of the easiest milkers I have milked over the years. But despite her being smaller than one of our goats, and pregnant, she was leaping over our fences like a caprine Olympian, so it was time to raise the fence.

The good news is that herd animals generally don’t go far once they are free, so she wasn’t at risk of wandering away like when we used to keep pigs. (One time, years ago, we hiked around the woods for about 3 hours after finding our escaped pigs decently far from here, and pigs do not tend to allow themselves to be herded easily….) But she was greeting a lot of folks in the parking area and generally getting in the way of cars… And she also figured out how to push our door open and joined us in the house twice. (That’s not a first around here. Below is a picture of one of our other goats, Bella, who I found in our house one day… She, too, found her way to the front porch, pushed the door open, and confused our dogs. Maybe we should make a goat-proof front door?)

Bella in our dining room in 2021, with our confused dogs, hiding behind the piano, photo by Kara

Anyway I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch (or my goats before they consistently stay in a pen), but she hasn’t gotten our since we raised the fence, and I am feeling optimistic. Now here is to figuring out how to keep her penned in on pastures this summer!

We appreciate this time of year because we have a bit more time for repair projects. December harvest days are shorter than the rest of the year because we are only harvesting the items that we get from the high tunnels this time of year. The rest of the crops we bring out in small batches at a time from the root cellar and clean up what is needed for each week. So with the rest of the time, we catch up with overdue tasks!

Have a great week,

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

Daikon Dip