10th Week of the Spring CSA season: Week of May 8th

Written By Evening Song Farm
close up from above of basil starts in 4 packs with beautiful, shiny green leaves

baby basil getting bigger every day, photo by Adam Ford

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have garlic, yellow potatoes, jumbo carrots*, beets, daikon radishes, rutabaga, yellow onions, mesclun mix, baby chard, green curly kale, spinach, pea shoots, and baby lettuce.

*Note on the carrots: We ran out of our winter storage carrots last week, and are filling in with very large organic carrots sourced from Juniper Hill Farm. They’re big but not bad: our kids are still chowing down on carrot sticks at dinner, and they tend to be our barometer for veggie flavor.

Click here to order your veggies for a delivered bag to Ludlow or Rutland

cucumber plants with head lettuce around them, photo by Adam Ford

these cukes will go into other people’s gardens, photo by Adam Ford

so will these gorgeous, aromatic leeks, photo by Adam Ford

Farm News

This week we finished up the second round of seeding all the plants for sale. We borrowed a PTO-driven chipper from Plew Farm to clean up all the brush around the fields, and Cindy and Bryan made a nice pile of new woodchips from that project that will be used for compost making this spring. Katie got the next round of outdoor beets and carrots in the ground, and the team started tackling a big weeding a mulching project around the blueberries. We planted blueberries in hopes to eventually have them as items in the CSA, but we haven’t yet had big enough harvests to make that a reality. Hopefully some of the management practices we have been introducing to the bushes in the past couple of years will eventually increase their yield. We got all the onions transplanted outside, and next week we hope to get all the leeks, shallots, kale, chard, kohlrabi, and potatoes in the ground.

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

Green Goddess Salad Dressing
close up of beet transplant in a mulched soil... the plant has 5 magenta and dark green outer leaves and three brighter green inner leaves with magenta veins

beet transplant, photo by Adam Ford

potatoes, photo by Adam Ford

inside a high tunnel: garden beds with foot tall tomato plants and black lines of drop irrigation alongside, as well as plant debris and younger plants growing alongside

this is what a tunnel looks like in transition.. the bed on the middle left has recently transplanted tomatoes down the middle of a bed, and bok choi leaves strewn on the soil where bok choi was harvested from this week. The bed on the middle right has more tomatoes recently transplanted down the middle of the bed, but on the outside of these tomatoes are carrots to be harvested in about a month. Once all these outer plantings are harvested, we will lay down landscape fabric between the rows of tomatoes to keep weeds under control for the season, photo by Adam Ford

rough looking strips of black landscape fabric covered in soil and grass and roots in between rows of blueberry plants

fabric being removed in blueberries, photo by Adam Ford

wood chips flying in the foreground as two people with ear protection feed a big green wood chipper attached to a tractor, all in front of a greenhouse and pile of brush headed for the chipper

Cindy and Bryan running the chipper, photo by Adam Ford

a light orange portable sawmill with sawdust on the ground in the foreground and stacks of blue wrapper pellets on pallets in the background

our neighbor’s portable saw mill made quick work of the logs Ryan harvested this winter, photo by Adam Ford

rows of overgrown red and green kale beds in a high tunnel with the sides rolled up

kale rapini in its last week of glory before we remove the greens to transplant summer crops, photo by Adam Ford

garden fields in various stages of preparation: a field in the left foreground covered with black landscape fabric, with an uncovered field of soil behind it, and a green cover cropped field in the background, on a cloudy day

a tarped field killing weeds before planting in a few weeks, photo by Adam Ford

a father and son walking together down the driveway with a painted pellet hopper on the right in front of a greenhouse

Ryan and Sky, photo by Adam Ford

a full sized- brown goat with a fern in its mouth on a dry leafy hillside above a rocky creek

we like taking our goats on hikes in the woods to browse until the spring time pastures have grown enough to have them on grass for the season, photo by Ryan

Vane working in the blueberry rows: Landscape fabric used to keep these bushes from competing with the grass and other weed when we laid it down about a decade ago. The weed pressure has increased over the years, so this year we are removing the landscape fabric, removing the rhizomes from the crab grass in the soil around the bushes, laying down a layer of compost, followed by a thick layer of shredded ash bark to manage weed control through heavy mulching going forward. It will still require a hand weeding or two each year, but is looking nice so far, photo by Adam Ford

large green wood chipper from the side that attaches to a tractor, sitting on the ground next to a gravel pile with a small metal, mobile goat shed in the pasture behind

borrowed chipper, photo by Adam Ford

one person feeding a tree top into the chipper while the other person looks on

from the feeding side, photo by Adam Ford

three Y-shaped boards lying on the ground in front of stacks of milled lumber

some cool live edge pieces from the milling we will get to use somehwere, photo by Adam Ford

close up of a line of black seedling trays with wispy green onion, leek, and shallot starts, lined up on a pallet with metal electrical conduit hoops over top

the onions, leeks, and shallots have been acclimating to the outdoors before getting transplanted, photo by Adam Ford

the scent of hyacinth brings me right back to shopping for potted plants with my mom as a kid, photo by Adam Ford

a selfie with a person wearing a black baseball cap with a small black baby goat on his shoulders on a cloudy day

selfie with a neck perching goat, photo by Adam Ford

close up of a black baby goat with light blue eyes standing in a living room on a wooden floor in front of a red couch with a door wide open and sunlight pouring in

Sophie says, “you leave the backdoor open, and I will absolutely come in to hang out,” photo by Ryan

Evening Song Farm
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