Last Week to Pre-Order Plants

If you have been thining about pre-ordering plants, do that now. The ordering window closes on Tuesday, and once that happens, we can’t manually add more pre-orders. There will be a variety of plants available to select from the barn as CSA items during mid--May to the first week in June, but the greatest variety is available by pre-ordering.

My first couple years farming, I tried to stay as “practical” as possible: don’t waste my time with flowers since they were just for joy and beauty, focus on the food. We grow flowers here for many reasons, but one essential one is feeding the honeybees and native pollinators throughout the season, so they are used to foraging in this vicinity when we need them for the vegetable production. Expanding the season that pollinators can eat is an essential part of what we do. And the bonus is having lots of lovely flowers to brighten the days, photo by Adam Ford.

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have spinach, green curly kale, flowering kale “raab,” baby kale, baby chard, baby lettuce, mesclun mix, baby arugula, pea shoots, parsley, red beets, chioggia beets, carrots, onions, daikon radishes, watermelon radish, kohlrabi, and yellow potatoes.

Flowering kale “raab” is a delicious, fun, spring treat. We harvest the tender shoots, flowers, and leaves of the kale plants right before they go to flower as they put energy into setting seed. We cook with them like broccoli raab. A simple way to enjoy them as a side dish is sauteed with butter, garlic, a bit of lemon juice and salt… so good!

*carrots, onions, and beets are sourced from Juniper Hill Farm, also certified organic

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

Wow, the weather has been so gorgeous! And it’s also provided the opporunity to do a lot of field preparation for outdoor planting. The team did a lot of row cover rolling up, plant debris removal, rock removal, and moving tarps to new spots. By next week we will be transplanting the first rounds of outdoor plants, as well as doing the second round of outdoor direct seeding. Getting the spring time started early has become so much easier as we have transitioned to reduced tillage practices…. an added benefit we didn’t know was in store when we shifted that direction.

The early tomatoes are looking great. This week the team spaced them out in the prop house so they can start growing a bit sturdier. When we have the trays full, the plants compete for sunlight and grow taller and flimsier, but when we give them twice the space, their stems get stronger and the plants grow stalkier.

Next week we will do a wild amount of seeding once the plant pre-order system shuts off and gives us totals for the myriad variety of items we are growing for folks. This is an especially fun week for me…. I just love starting people’s garden seeds and imaging all the possibilities for growth and joy and deliciousness happening in other gardens. (I am pretty sure that when I “retire” from farming, I will still have to run a small, spring garden starts business…. It’s just too fun.)

This is not news about Evening Song Farm, but Vanessa (my sister-in-law) and my brother (who will be joining the team this summer season) operate a farm in Putamayo, Colombia. (Another family lives there with them to manage the farm while they are in Vermont in the spring and summer this year.) This week the region of the jungle that they live in experienced dramatic flooding along a river that runs through part of the property. The family they live there with safely evacuated, and the buildings on the property were mostly spared because they are built on large stilts like treehouses, but there was extensive damage to their crops. They grow lots of fun things: chontaduro (peach palm), plantain, yucca, sugar cane, baby bananas, cacao, among other things. The chontaduro are super large palm trees, with the fruit at the top, and only a few of those trees were taken down by the velocity of the water. Fascinatingly, many of the cacao plants seemed to make it through the storm. Most of the rest is gone. Of course, he already heard from his older sister (me), that he should absolutely not develop a farm near a river, based on our Irene experience. But the specifc nature of the terrain, and the location of the buildings and growing spaces felt like they could be protected enough even during big rain events during the rainy season. According to neighbors in their area, this flood was a particularly big event, and the reality is that climate disruption is happening everywhere. Rain events are getting bigger. My brother will be traveling back to Colombia in a few weeks, and will have the opportunity to take the next steps in managing farmland in a flood-prone location.

Have a great week,

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