8th Week of the Summer CSA season: Week of July 25th

pick your own flower garden is slowly coming along, photo by Ryan

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.

onions and shallots above the tunnels, photo by Ryan

Bella, photo by Ryan

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow beets, red beets, parsley, garlic scapes, caraflex cabbage, red cabbage, baby lettuce, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, rhubarb, scallions, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, zucchini, yellow summer squash, purple kohlrabi, fennel, celery, garlic, French filet green beans, new potatoes, and heirloom tomatoes.

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.

sunset trough the propagation house, photo by Ryan

healthy garlic bulb, photo by Ryan

Farm News

Welp, you know that phrase, don’t count your chickens before they hatch? I kinda counted my carrots before we pulled them out of the saturated ground….crop losses from the July 10th flooding seem to be a slow burn at our place, because last week as we harvested carrots for CSA, we encountered about a 90% loss of carrots to rot from sitting in saturated soil. Ooof. These types of crop losses are just a bummer because we could have pulled them after all the rain, and not lost nearly as much. But we just didn’t think about how affected they would be in such wet soil for so long. Radishes were also a complete loss last week, rotting from wet feet, and some other crops like fall red cabbage exhibited the same hypoxic condition that killed off the spinach and arugula last week. Many other crops in the field are suffering with fertility issues as nutrients were leached through the soil or rendered unavailable to plants from anerobic soil conditions. The pea plants finished the season unexpectedly early, with most of the plants yellowing from lack of nutrients, which is a special bummer since growing peas is a labor-intensive labor of love, mostly due to setting up a big trellis system for them. We have been topdressing other crops that are showing fertility issues with an addition of fertilizer, so hopefully some of the current nutrient deficiencies in younger crops can be mitigated before they are harvested. And yet, in spite of all of the challenges of vegetable growing in excessive rainy conditions, we’re still so grateful that our land and infrastructure were undamaged from a storm that was so devastating to so many farms, homes, and businesses across the region. It really does make these little setbacks so much easier to take in stride.

The other fact that makes it so much easier to roll with the challenges is that even with all those little setbacks, so much of this summer’s harvest is excellent! The green beans, celery, fennel, and garlic that are new this week all look outstanding. Tomatoes are amazing, cherry tomatoes are about to become abundant, and it’s been the best year yet for cucumbers. And all of the fall crops that we have planted through cover crop residue—cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and fall zucchini, went through the intense rain looking without any signs of stress. And the pick your own flower garden is an incredible show of orange and yellow calendula, with many more flowers beginning to bloom. The first pick your own flower garden was planted to bring a little extra sunshine and rainbow to our collective lives during the pandemic, and despite some of the stress and chaos of the past few weeks, that flower garden is still a little spot of sunshine and rainbows for us when we want to just wind down at the end of the day. If you haven’t started visiting it to cut flowers yet, please do… there are scissors right inside the CSA pickup spot in the barn. More varieties of flowers will start blooming in the next few weeks.

Also, a joy from last week was passing our organic inspection with flying colors. It’s always nice when that goes well, because it takes a particularly sharp and detailed level of record keeping throughout the year, that I often feel like I am barely doing well at, but it’s working. I also appreciate the focus on biodiversity and soil building VOF places on the certification. Organic certification isn’t just about what toxic inputs growers are NOT putting on fields, but also what practices they are incorporating to develop a more resilient agricultural system for the future.

Have a great week.

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

Weekly Recipe

This is the fall red cabbage planting, you can see some of the healthy, larger plants on the left, and the smaller dying ones are the ones affected by hypoxia, so there will be a certain amount of yield reduction from this planting, photo by Ryan

we pulled some fine carrots from last week’s planting, but most were like this, photo by Ryan

pea plants struggling with the washed away fertility…. before we even got to “sugar snap pea lemonade” stage as requested by our kiddos, photo by Ryan

not a water stress related picture…. we just liked how happy the crab grass looked taking over the leek holes…. the leeks are much happier now after these were weeded this week, photo by Ryan

0/10 : do not recommend the smell of a field of rotten carrots, photo by Ryan

one of the garlic patches didn’t like all the rain, so we pulled it early. Amazingly, the bulbs had sized up and look great, photo by Ryan

it’s hard to see in this picture, but the next round of green beans is struggling with fertility wash out, photo by Ryan

some things still look good though, like the pepper and eggplant field…. soon we will be harvesting the first round of Asian eggplant, and hopefully the Italian varieties sometime after that, photo by Ryan

same with these beets… It’s likely that a little fertilizer can help these hungry plants get back on track. photo by Ryan

this picture made me chuckle because of the juxtaposition of what we have been dealing with and seeing the irrigation main line in a field… we obviously haven’t irrigated in a long time, it’s just where it was last, photo by Ryan

It’s fun to see the things that are still doing well. These are brussels sprouts planted directly into a rolled down rye and vetch cover crop, with a clover cover crop under-sowed beneath the plants. It seems like this area of the field drained its water well enough to prevent hypoxia, and it also seems like the mulch layer has retained nutrients well enough thanks to the good soil cover, photo by Ryan

this is insect netting on fall rutabaga to keep flee beetles and cabbage maggot from destroying the emerging seedlings, photo by Ryan

newly seeded greens between peppers in the Chocolate Factory, photo by Ryan

grain corn and winter squash look great, photo by Ryan

fall carrots had to be re-seeded after the rain, but a few little cuties did remain, photo by Ryan

we walk around the fields in the evenings to check on things more closely than we get to during the day while we are hustling through all the fast-paced projects of keeping the farm on track…. and sometimes the sky gives us a little pastel painting to be the background to our field assessments, and that feels really nice, photo by Ryan

Same situation with this good looking fall broccoli planting… It’s incredibly encouraging to see how well this no-till setup works with the various stressors of the season… it is effective at weed suppression, soil protection, nutrient management, and often disease prevention…. It feels like a fantasy, but maybe it’s time to figure out how to do all 4 acres this way? photo by Ryan

these are one of the grosser looking pests we deal with: potato beetle larva on a potato plant… we just knock them off the plant to set them back, photo by Ryan

healthy cherry tomato plants should start booming soon, photo by Ryan

fall broccoli ready to transplant, photo by Ryan

mowed and covered cover crop ready for those broccoli transplants, photo by Ryan

I took this picture of Bella and Zeah happily grazing in the drizzly rain on July 10th, because this scene provided a moment of calm and reassurance to me that day I was feeling overwhelmed at the flooding happening in the valleys….. 12 years ago these (much younger) goats had to be evacuated from their grazing field during Irene and spend a couple nights at a friend’s place…. so I was feeling especially grateful during that rainy day that these two senior ladies who have provided us with so much milk over the years, got to stay at home, and graze in the rain instead of dash off in a trailer, photo by Kara