8th Week of the Summer CSA season: Week of July 26th

Jul 23

*tomatoes on the vine, 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 email reminder that CSA payment is due: make that payment, let us know when you will be able to, or let us know if the amount due seems wrong. It adds a lot of extra computer time to try to repeatedly follow up with folks individually, so this is a simple way to lighten our administrative work. (Some of the auto emails have been a little funky, so we are happy to answer those questions if you get a weird one.) Thank you!

*washed carrots in bins, photo by Adam Ford*

*canna lily at the flower garden, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have tomatoes, celery, fennel, new red potatoes, green beans, garlic scapes, purple kohlrabi, basil, parsley, green cabbage, red cabbage, red and yellow beets, baby lettuce, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, zucchini, summer squash, slicing cucumbers, Japanese cucumbers, garlic bulbs, and carrots.

Check out this week’s recipe for "fake-a-mole” below. Many years ago we sampled a delicious spread at a farmers’ market near Ithaca, NY that we really wanted to have regularly… It took some trials over the years, but this recipe is pretty much what we tasted, and it’s such a fun dip and spread that really hits the spot the way guacamole does. With a good olive oil mimicking the fats of the avocado, the smoothness of the roasted zucchini, and the kick of the garlic scapes, it’s very pleasing. (Bigger zukes work best for this recipe, as the flesh seems to get even softer and creamier than smaller ones. Though small ones will work just fine, too.)

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 Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

If you have any trouble using the online to order your veggies this week (or change your pickup location, or skip this week, or anything…) reach out to us. It’s easy to help.

*cherry tomatoes coming in a bit slow this year, harvested, photo by Adam Ford*

Did you know?

We love getting feedback on veggies when issues arise. We take several steps to make sure we don’t send out bad veggies, but between packing over 100 CSA bags and stocking hundreds of pounds in the display cooler in the barn every day, sometimes it still happens. We like to know about it to make sure it’s not indicative of a larger problem we have to address (for example, like spinning lettuce dry longer!), and so your items can be replaced. Send us an email, (and a bonus is to include a picture so we can see if we understand the problem better), and don’t feel bad about it! We love making sure you get good food.

*the pollinators are happy, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week the flower garden is ready enough to start picking flowers. Last year, for the first time, we planted a pick-your-own flower garden next to the barn that was a big hit for all of us. This year the space is larger, with some new flower varieties, a couple beds of edible flowers, and even a bed of fun culinary herbs, like papalo, red and green shiso, thai basil, lemon grass, etc. (There is also a bed of picnic peppers, but those aren’t ripe yet: when you start seeing red, orange, or yellow mini peppers on those plants, go wild: they are a fun, sweet treat!) Over the next few weeks, there will be lots of new types of flowers blooming in there. The flower garden is available for CSA members to harvest any bouquet they like on CSA pickup days…it’s one way we like to share our thanks with the CSA members who help make it possible for all of us to do what we do on this little farm. (Picking flowers or herbs from this area are not an “item,” just a bonus to enjoy.)

This week we transplanted all storage cabbage for fall and winter, as well as the fall kale and chard plantings, and the later season cucumbers, zucchini, and squash. Ryan and Katie keep up with the weekly field seedings for quick growing crops. The solar equipment shed starting going up, which is exciting… hopefully by the end of the summer we will be producing all the electrical power that the farm uses! (Our current solar array only provides about half of our use, as the farm expanded over the years.) We kept trellising tomatoes, and even snuck in some weeding.

Jake, the resident climate scientist farming with us this summer, will start taking over some newsletters here and there to answer climate change questions that are being sent his way. So check out his first question, below! (And if you have any questions you would love to see answered in newsletters, you can email him directly at jacob.t.seeley@gmail.com.)

ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, Molly, Taylor, K2, Galen, Katie, Cindy, Miguel, Vanessa, Jake, Regan (and Sky and Soraya)

Fake-amole

Climate Questions Answered

This is Jake, checking in with some climate science! Thanks to the awesome CSA member who submitted the following climate question:

Can you help us understand the issues behind the climate debate — what is driving the disparate opinions. Is it always money? Is it a lack of demonstrable climate evidence? Daily, I read positions from both sides of the (political) spectrum about the seriousness of the situation/or the falseness of climate issues claims. (Question slightly shortened for space.)

This is a deep question about the source of our country’s polarization on climate issues. To do it justice would take far more space than we have in this newsletter, but I can briefly address the two potential sources of polarization suggested in the question: money and lack of evidence.

First: I don’t think debate on climate issues is primarily fueled by a lack of evidence. The core claims of climate science — claims such as “The climate is warming” and “Human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible” — are extremely well supported by multiple lines of evidence. (I would be happy to share some of that evidence another time.)

At the same time, the “seriousness” of the climate situation is not only a question of the evidence. Climate science can tell us what is happening and why, but it can’t tell us what we should do about it, because that depends on our values. My view is that most of the current debate on climate is actually about the proposed societal responses to climate change.

That brings us to the second potential source of polarization: money. There’s no denying that oil and gas companies see serious climate mitigation — that is, a drastic reduction in our use of fossil fuels — as an existential threat. It is in these companies’ self-interest to delay a transition away from fossil fuels by rustling up debate where there is actually consensus. I can recommend a great book by Naomi Oreskes, “Merchants of Doubt”, which describes how fossil fuel companies are currently using the same tactics that were developed by tobacco companies to cast doubt on the scientific link between cigarettes and lung cancer.

Of course, there’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll have to leave it there for now. Jake out!