*Taylor found this sweet heart shaped tomato, photo by Molly Hornbeck*

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!

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have slicing tomatoes, paste tomatoes, grape tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, husk cherries, shallots, sweet onions, celery, fennel, leeks, garlic scapes, purple kohlrabi, basil, parsley, cilantro, poblano peppers, baby lettuce, spinach, arugula, pea shoots, baby bok choi, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, rainbow chard bunches, mini romaine heads, red beets bunches, yellow beet bunches, carrot bunches, brussels crowns*, new potatoes, zucchini, summer squash, garlic bulbs, green tomatoes, and spaghetti squash.

*What are brussels crowns? Excellent question: This time of year we break the tender growing tip from the top of brussels sprout plants to force the plant to put energy into making the actual brussels sprouts larger, versus continuing to put upward energy into growing a taller stalk. The tops are delicious, tender, and hold up well. We use them like a cooking green, and our kids especially love them cut into fine ribbons in mac and cheese. You can chop them up and cook them with garlic and olive oil for a simple, delicious side dish. They are a relatively short season, so enjoy them while we have them for a few weeks!

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.

Fall CSA Sign Up

We finally have our Fall CSA season ready for sign ups. We do keep the fall, winter, and spring memberships smaller than the summer, and we prioritize space for returning CSA members, but try to sign up sooner than later.

Farm News

This week we pulled the first round of tomatoes out from one of the tunnels to start preparing the space to steam the soil next week and then transplant winter greens. Managing production for CSA availability nearly year round is a constant dance of pulling plants out early enough to seed and transplant plants for harvests in the upcoming weeks/months, but not too early when we still need the current production. Despite this being our 14th year running some type of market garden, and that it usually works out in terms of timing production for each season, it always comes with some amount of worry that we won’t nail the timing of pulling and replanting to have the wide variety of weekly choices of veggies that we want throughout the year. And that second guessing and worrying is extra loud this time of year, because our brains and bodies are a bit fried form the high pace of work during the summer growing season. I imagine there isn’t much reason to overthink it… there will be plenty of winter greens to harvest, as there always have been, and we still have other tomatoes chugging along in other tunnels… but that’s where our brains are this week.

The team transplanted lots of fall greens this week for one of the last big outdoor planting, before everything else we transplant is in the tunnels. We push the outdoor harvest season as long as possible to allow the tunnels greens to grow and store as long as possible. So outdoors we use lots of heavy duty row cover to extend the outdoor harvest later in the fall… sometimes even crawling under mini tunnels of snow when we get some early season snow dumps. It’s fun to imagine how cold and stiff our fingers will be harvesting some of these greens as we transplant them on warm, sunny, early September days.

And we are pleased with the new, current round of beets we are harvesting: usually harvesting beets comes with substantial disappointment about how many beets are lost to field rodent damage… just one little bite here or there in each beet… they aren’t even efficient at finishing the one they start with, ugh! But this planting (fingers crossed it stays this way) is awesome, with no rodent damage so far, thanks to aggressive weed whacking around the area to minimize their habitat, as well as regularly resetting traps. So it’s been a pleasure to harvest gorgeous beets to bunch.

Have a great week,

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