*pick your own flower and herb garden wildness this week, 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!

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have slicing tomatoes, paste tomatoes, grape tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, husk cherries, shallots, sweet onions, celery, leeks, garlic scapes, purple kohlrabi, basil, parsley, cilantro, baby lettuce, spinach, arugula, pea shoots, baby bok choi, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, rainbow chard bunches, red beets bunches, yellow beet bunches, carrot bunches, brussels crowns, red carmen sweet bull’s horn peppers, zucchini, summer squash, garlic bulbs, green tomatoes, spaghetti squash, mini butternut, delicata, and painted mountain flour corn**.

*The mini butternut is VERY small. These are a delicious little squash that was bred for flavor, and to have a “single serving” size for two people. (They are not a standard butternut variety that didn’t size up… they are ripe and delicious at this size. You can read about this variety and how to use them here.) Think of it like cooking a delicata squash that has the shape and flavor of a butternut. The skin on this is apparently tender enough to eat as well, just like a delicata.

**The painted mountain flour corn is a grain corn that we use extensively after grinding into flour for many things such as corn bread, tortillas, empanadas, pancakes, waffles, in veggie “meat balls,” etc. We use a little hand crank grain grinder, but we have heard from folks who successfully grind their corn with a coffee grinder and food processor. It is also a beautiful decorative corn to display this time of year. Also, we put a small drill bit in our drill, and carefully drill through 1 row of the kernels on the cob at a time, and then remove them, and they make extraordinary beads for kids to make things with. Really, an all around fun food!

*Painted Mountain grain corn, photo by Vanessa Bedoya Melguizo*

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

The Fall CSA season is 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.

Community News

Thanks to one of our CSA members who clued us in to the US Forest Service pending proposal for an extensive logging project on public land known as the Telephone Gap, north and west of the Rutland area. While I understand that active forest management can be an important part of living in the landscape and managing our environment, as I became acquainted with this particular project, I am concerned for the ecological and climatic impacts this particular project would have locally and beyond. If you are curious about this logging project, check out this website (a collaborative effort between 11 environmental groups) that has compiled a summary of the project. The website provides also provides simple action steps if you want your voice heard. (Your farmer was raised on a steady diet of Captain Planet and FernGully as a kid, so cutting down any trees always gives me pause.)

*fall red cabbage in the foreground still heading up, pea shoot beds in the center, flower garden in the background, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

Woohoo, we got two of our tunnels steamed with the giant soil steamer we rented for the week. It was a big project, having to set up the “sock” over hoops on the soil, and weighed down by heavy chains to keep the steam in. Each tunnel took 7 set ups to steam all the soil, and once it is set up over the beds, it takes about 3 hours to get to the right temperature before it can be moved to set up the next area. Last year we steamed one tunnel as a trial, and the results for weed and disease management overwinter were incredibly promising.

To steam the soil it means we ripped out all the plants in both of those tunnels, so last week we did a tremendous amount of harvesting the last of the fruits on those plants, and then pulling of plants to make the beds ready for steaming. Once the tunnels were done, we immediately started transplanting many fall greens that have been patiently waiting in their trays in the propagation house. It’s fun to tuck in these plants on a beautiful, warm sunny day, imaging coming back here with frozen fingers to harvest them in the winter.

Hopefully next week we will start harvesting the grain corn, because it seems like the bear who ate so many of our melons all summer and bothered our bee hives a couple weeks ago, is now snacking on the grain corn patch. We also plan to finish transplanting and seeing the tunnels for winter production.

Have a great week,

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