*Katie, Kara and Ryan harvesting a little more last-minute spinach, photo by Adam Ford*

CSA Balance Due

This is the last week of the CSA. Please finish paying your balance this week so we don’t have to follow up with payments during our CSA break. Thanks!

You can pay online through your account (with a card or e-check ACH payment), mail a check to Evening Song Farm 48 Nice Road, Cuttingsville VT 05738, leave a check or cash in the CSA cash box at the barn, send money with Venmo @eveningsongcsa, or use EBT. Thank you!

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow potatoes, red potatoes, baby kale, claytonia, Tokyo Bekana, baby tat soi, mesclun mix, baby lettuce, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale, garlic, leeks, carrots, baby carrots, Painted Mountain grain corn, brussels sprouts, watermelon radish, daikon radish, mini red lettuce heads, mini green lettuce heads, green cabbage, rutabaga, yellow onions, and Gilfeather turnip.

*You can still choose between cleaned up green brussels sprouts and U-Trim brussels sprouts with outer yellow leaves. The entire rest of the brussels sprout is fine. This is a very slow, time consuming step to take for the 100+ pints of brussels sprouts we clean up each week, but it’s not a big deal when I bring a pint or two into my house to clean up for dinner… this way you can get twice as many brussels sprouts for your item ordered, but you will have to take a few minutes to remove the outer yellow leaves on them. Last week we heard that some actually bad brussels sprouts snuck their way into someone’s quart of brussels, but we should be sorting more effectively this week.

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 Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Farm News

Thank you for participating in the fall CSA program! We’re grateful for all the sweet notes of thanks for what we do, and we’re so thankful for all of you for supporting the work that this farm does. From the very first year of running a production vegetable operation in Pennsylvania, we were always drawn to the CSA model to have a more direct relationship with the folks who eat this food. We’ve been through several iterations of our CSA…the first year in 2011 we had a more limited time to pick up from the farm and we actually hung out to say hi to everyone during pickup! These day’s I’m thankful for all the ways that CSA makes it possible for us to run this farm: it allows us to take good care of this land, to work with an amazing team of people, and, we hope, to grow and harvest healthy, high quality, and delicious vegetables for you. Thank you for helping make it possible for us to do this.

We’re all looking forward to this winter time of our seasonal rhythm, where we’ll take a break from the normal harvesting, washing, planting, weeding and other tasks that normally take up the bulk of our time in March through December. This winter we hope to harvest some firewood and sawlogs from our forest, do a few simple home improvement projects, go cross country skiing and ice skating, and take our family on a few trips to visit far away friends. I (Ryan) am also excited for a seed production course that I’ll get to take this winter, offered through the Cornell Cooperative Extension. I’ll learn a lot about the details of seed saving, and will also work with a mentor to grow a seed crop in 2024. One of my goals is to one day become a part of a network of vegetable farmers who saves and exchanges high quality seed for use on our own farms. I love that there is always something new to learn in managing a vegetable farm.

And finally, for those who are interested in Evening Song veggies during this winter break, we will be wholesaling a few greens and storage crops to some local retail establishments (Rutland Co-op, Pierce’s Store, Plew Farm, and Squire Family Farm). This will be a low-key affair: basically we’ll harvest for wholesale accounts week-by-week if the weather is warm enough to do it without a lot of extra work and misery. We’ll send an email out on the weeks that veggies go to any of these coops/farmstands in case you want to swing by. Because our own barn isn’t well set up for distributing veggies during the super cold temperatures, and because we have learned that we aren’t consistently successful at following through on many special orders without having a system like our weekly CSA distributions or wholesale outlets, we won’t be offering vegetables a-la-carte at the farm. And stay tuned for an email for signup for the next CSA season. We hope to have that up on the website by February.

Have a great week and a restful new year,

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

Savory Waffles