*husk cherries and garlic on CSA display, 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, husk cherries, shallots, sweet onions, celery, leeks, seed garlic, purple kohlrabi, parsley, cilantro, baby lettuce, spinach, pea shoots, baby bok choi, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, red beets bunches, yellow beet bunches, Chioggia beet bunches*, carrots, caraflex cabbage, red carmen sweet bull’s horn peppers**, zucchini, garlic bulbs, green tomatoes, spaghetti squash, mini butternut, delicata squash, and red and yellow potatoes.

*Chioggia beet bunches are a bright reddish/magenta and white striped beet, often called candy striped beet. They are sweet and lovely, slightly less of a “strong” beet flavor than red beets.

**This week the Carmen peppers that will be available to harvest will be partially ripened, so they will have both red and green on them.

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.

Please finish paying for your summer share to reserve a spot for the fall share. Due to the demand for fall share, and time it takes to follow up with unpaid CSA seasons, we aren’t able to reserve a spot in the next CSA season if the previous season hasn’t been paid for. Thanks!

Farm News

This week we continued to transplant greens into the tunnel for winter production, weeded some carrot plantings for a later harvest, row covered lots of frost sensitive outdoor crops that we hope to eek a few more harvests out of, and finished harvesting all the winter squash out before the frost. One of the varieties of winter squash we grow is called Tetsukabuto… a variety we were introduced to by Ryan’s dad years ago. It’s a large, round, dark green winter squash with bright orange inner flesh. It take several weeks to cure, but then it’s one of our absolute favorite squashes. So it won’t be ready to go out until sometime during the fall share, since it takes awhile for the starches to convert to sugars, but it’s worth the wait. It’s not a popular squash to grow commercially because it doesn’t look that pretty or inviting, so it takes a fair bit of encouragement for folks to try it. If you have done our CSA before, and you are familiar with it, you probably know that once you try, no encouragement is needed!

Next week we may start the lengthy process of cracking up our garlic heads for garlic planting. It takes us a fair bit of time to crack all the heads needed for planting when we plant about 1/4 acre of garlic. And the culinary part of me always has a hard time putting our biggest and best cloves in the ground for growing versus in my pan of olive oil for eating, but it’s really worth it to grow the biggest seed to have the best harvest next year.

People often ask us if things slow down a bit after the first frost of the season, and I just say that things change. Since we produce year round, our projects shift: we row cover lots of things this time of year, keep cleaning up fields so they can be ready for winter, keep seeding and transplanting in the tunnel, sort the veggies we have started to store, and work on getting everything out of the ground before everything freezes up for the year. We appreciate how weeds are a bit slower this time of year, which definitely cuts back on that type of management. And so far this season, the days continue to be warm and pleasant enough to harvest without our fingers hurting. That will change soon, but it’s nice to have these mild fall days for now!

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