We are not a flower farm, but we try to have continuous blooms throughout the growing season to attract pollinators and be an vibrant space with plenty of biodiversity for optimal vegetable production and earth health, photo by Adam Ford

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow onions, carrots, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, fingerling potatoes, baby spinach, cooking spinach, mesclun mix, scallions, green curly kale, pea shoots, radishes, baby bok choi, salad turnips, arugula, and green garlic.

“Baby spinach” and “cooking spinach”: We continue to harvest brand new baby spinach plantings that were planted this spring. They are smaller leaves, excellent for tender salads. The “cooking spinach” is the same spinach you have been enjoying for the past few months… these overwintered plants are producing larger (but still tender) leaves, so starting this week, we will be harvesting them a bit bigger and packing heavier bags of the “cooking” spinach.

If you are coming to the farm to pick out your veggies from the display cooler, you don’t need to use the order form below.

CSA Bag Delivery Order Form

Fill out the delivery form by noon on Tuesdays.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

*Adam can even make photos of repair projects looks like art, photo by Adam Ford*

Summer CSA Signup

Thanks to everyone who signed up for the summer CSA. If you haven’t yet, and you are planning on it, you can sign up here.

Summer CSA Details

Farm News from Ryan

(Optional bonus reading)

This week was a joyful week of work at Evening Song Farm, in spite some cold and wet weather. On Tuesday, before the big rain that evening, our team of 6 that day spent most of the day setting transplants in 2 different fields. We planted our first round of spring brassicas (kale, cabbage, broccoli, and kohlrabi) along with lettuce and scallions...over 4,000 transplants and 2,000 onion sets (tiny, mostly dormant onion bulbs we plant very close together, to harvest as scallions.) For a small vegetable farm like us, we grow a lot of closely spaced transplanted crops. Many farms that plant this many transplants in a day have invested in a transplanting machine that gets pulled down the row by a tractor. With a transplanter, one tractor driver and two or three folks riding on the back of the machine can transplant incredibly quickly. But those types of machines work best when you use them on very long rows (they are a little cumbersome to turn around), and also when transplanting one or two types of crops at the exact same spacing. They’re great if you are planting half an acre of cucumber or peppers, but our rows are much shorter, and we make a lot of smaller plantings of a wide variety of vegetables in the summer: 50 feet of red cabbage, 50 feet of mini-romaine lettuce, 100 feet of lacinato kale. As much as I would love to streamline our transplanting, a farm like ours seems to do well by transplanting the old-fashioned way: 3 or 4 of us laying thousands of plants on the marked rows of the soil, with two or three others following behind to tuck the rootball in, over and over. On our team the past couple years there’s usually a lot of laughter and boisterous conversation...it can be very enjoyable work.

Another joy of the week is some progress a project I’ve been excited about since this winter. While our spring brassicas are transplanted on bare soil, later in the summer we plant a final planting of brassicas to mature in the fall: brussels sprouts, storage cabbage, napa cabbage, kale, and broccoli. We’ve learned that for our fall brassicas, we can plant them on a grown-in-place mulch. We start by growing an overwintered rye cover crop to maturity, until mid June: the rye will be over 6ft high at that point. Then we roll the rye to the ground, cover it with old greenhouse plastic on a sunny day, and plant our fall brassicas right through the plant residue (a grown-in-place mulch). The best part is, the thick mulch keeps just about all weed seeds from germinating in those gardens: it basically eliminates all the weeding we would otherwise need to do.

Here I am spreading an organic nitrogen soil amendment on our rye field.  Growing cover crops on fields like this is common on vegetable farms.  It’s a little less common for vegetable growers to fine-tune soil fertility for cover crops…that special treatment is usually reserved for vegetable crops.  Becky Maden of UVM extension is supporting us in doing extensive soil testing over the course of this season to understand how much nitrogen is available in our cover crop fields, and the no-till vegetables that come after.  Our goal for the spring is to provide the rye with all the soil nutrients that it needs so that it can grow as much soil-covering mulch as possible for our fall brassicas, photo by Adam Ford — Here I am spreading an organic nitrogen soil amendment on our rye field. Growing cover crops on fields like this is common on vegetable farms. It’s a little less common for vegetable growers to fine-tune soil fertility for cover crops…that special treatment is usually reserved for vegetable crops. Becky Maden of UVM extension is supporting us in doing extensive soil testing over the course of this season to understand how much nitrogen is available in our cover crop fields, and the no-till vegetables that come after. Our goal for the spring is to provide the rye with all the soil nutrients that it needs so that it can grow as much soil-covering mulch as possible for our fall brassicas, photo by Adam Ford

The only trouble we’ve had with this new-to-us growing practice is that it’s much more laborious to actually get the plants transplanted into that soil. You can’t just make a little hole with your fingers to plant the seedling (since there is a dense mat of material that used to be 6 feet tall), so we have to loosen each hole with a pitchfork. It’s not much fun to do a thousand times in a row. This winter I talked to some other farmers who had more experience with no-till equipment, and I came up with an idea for a simple implement to loosen up the soil where we will transplant in those areas, while disturbing as little soil as possible.

The toolbar was put together by Wayne Jones and his son Neil (they run the metal shop on Rt 103 in Mt Holly.) They are talented and have an extensive shop. (Kara’s edit: and they are willing and able to work with Ryan’s very cool, innovative new tool design to bring that idea to fruition.) Onto that toolbar we clamped on three large coulters: rolling discs that cut a narrow slit in the soil. The coulters are closely followed with a conventional agriculture tool called a fertilizer knife: it’s designed to inject chemical fertilizer directly in the soil. On our organic farm, we won’t hook up those fertilizer knives to a tank of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer to ‘feed’ our crops. Instead, the function of that knife will be to open up the slit from the coulter just enough for us to easily tuck a transplant into the row.

Tractor implements last longest if they are painted to prevent rusting, so this implement was painted in house by the farmer/artist, Molly Hornbeck. Since we had to paint it anyway, it was a no brainer to have Molly choose whatever colors and designs that inspired her, incorporating my request that I envisioned it having wild colors, including pink. She did not disappoint.

The first run of this machine was Friday on bare soil, preparing two beds to plant our earliest red and yellow potatoes. It made three narrow slits in the soil, generally just big enough for us to push in a potato seed. You can see that the coulters are each followed closely by a narrow metal shank (the fertilizer knife). When it will be run through the high crop residue in late June, I am not sure yet if the metal shanks will follow easily in the path cut by the coulter, or if they will get clogged with rye stems. We will see. It’s a new adventure to be designing our own tractor tools, so adjustments may be made as it gets used for its primary function.

Hope everyone has a great week!

-Kara, Ryan, Cindy, Sam, Molly, Taylor, Katie, Grace, and Morgan

Weekly Recipe

Molly has been busy uploading years of older recipes to the new recipe index on the website site so that you can easily search and browse all the ones that we haves shared in the past. Eventually all the historical recipes will be there. Below is the button for this week’s featured recipe for a Jingalov hats, which are a delicious way to eat any greens!

Get The Recipe