*beautiful fall sky over the barn field, 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 husk cherries, shallots, celery, leeks, seed garlic, purple kohlrabi, cilantro, baby lettuce, spinach, pea shoots, baby bok choi, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, red beets, yellow beet bunches, carrots, sweet green Italian peppers, zucchini, garlic bulbs, green tomatoes, spaghetti squash, mini butternut, delicata squash, purple and white daikon radishes, baby kale, mesclun mix, green napa cabbage, jalapeno peppers, green serrano peppers, watermelon radish, French filet green beans, and red and yellow potatoes.

It was an experiment this year to plant late season French filet green beans, and it was a success! A real treat to have them this time of year.

*fall lettuce and spinach rows in the field, photo by Adam Ford*

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

Fall CSA sign up is here. If you want to continue getting newsletters, even if you aren’t doing the fall share, you can sign up with that link and select “newsletter only” to continue hearing from us each week.

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

THANK YOU for joining the summer CSA season! We have a tremendous amount of gratitude that we can continue operating a CSA with nearly 300 folks/families deciding to get their veggies from this little farm during the main growing season. We could not do this without all of your support, so thank you. If you continue with us year round, the fall share starts next week, so sign up for fall if you haven’t already. If you just do the summer season, have a great winter! (The weekly email list gets reset each season, so if you don’t sign up, then you won’t keep getting emails. You can sign up just to get the newsletter, without buying a share for the season. That’s for if you want to keep getting our emails until you jump back in to the next summer season.)

This week I was thinking about how a magnificent amount of seemingly small things matter, on the farm, and everywhere. This idea particularly popped up when I saw a picture of Molly (below) loading some greens into the CSA display cooler. That’s such an incredibly simple motion: loading some bagged greens into the cooler for folks to snag when they pick out their items, but it takes so many simple motions, done well, thoughtfully, effectively, repetitively that make cool things happen here. And based on all the sweet notes, thank you cards, emails, etc that we get form CSA members throughout the year, I think those cool things seem to matter to lots of folks in the community. Culturally, and especially in a state like Vermont that is characterized by its agricultural landscape, farmers are the recipients of a general good reputation as hard working land stewards, feeding their community. Sometimes I wonder if that reputation is universally earned, but when I see how dedicated everyone who works on this team is to growing healthy food and getting it out into the community, I feel humbled they choose to work with us, and in awe of all the small things they do here that create bigger impacts. In our house, with a 4- and 5-year old, we learn about and practice a new value every other week, and fittingly, this week’s value is “gratitude.” Perhaps that’s why I have an extra sense of gratitude towards the hard working farmers on the Evening Song Farm team. Anyway, thanks to everyone here who makes all of this happen.

Speaking of gratitude, I always like to take a moment each season to remind CSA members to give themselves a pat on the back for how their participation in a CSA benefits the larger community: The most direct way is through charitable food donation. When farms grow food, there is always some type of surplus. So simply by keeping a small farm in your community in business, you are a layer of getting food donated to various community organizations who work towards addressing food insecurity among your neighbors. (Each year, we send out thousands of pounds of fresh produce to at least half a dozen charitable food sites in the Rutland and Ludlow area.) So we are grateful that your CSA participation is one ingredient in supporting food access issues. There are plenty of other ways that choosing a CSA benefits the larger community: this farm participates in agricultural climate research for food production in the northeast, prioritizes biodiversity and ecosystems for all sorts of critters in and around the farm, keeps land in food production in our community… We are grateful for all the ways your decision to get a CSA share benefits food insecurity and environmental issues… thank you.

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