*cherry tomatoes are finally pumping out the treats! photo by Adam Ford*

CSA Balance Due

If you haven’t already paid, your balance is due. 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. It’s very cool to pay in smaller chunks, just let us know what your payment plan is.

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow beets, red beets, parsley, carrots, scallions, baby lettuce, spinach, pea shoots, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale bunches, slicing cucumbers, Japanese slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, zucchini, yellow summer squash, purple kohlrabi, celery, garlic, basil, cilantro, Asian eggplant, Italian eggplant, husk cherries, Carmen sweet peppers, snack peppers, poblano peppers, jalapeño peppers, green tomatoes, sweet onions, shallots, cherry tomatoes, plum tomatoes, and heirloom tomatoes.

If you do any bulk preserving, now is a great time to snag bulk pickling cucumbers and dill heads. This is also the week to snag jalapenos if you use any for fermenting, hot sauce, pickled jalapenos, jalapeno jelly, or whatever! Send us an email for wholesale pricing on anything you are looking to preserve.

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

Farm News

There is so much going on at the farm this time of year. It’s a big project to harvest all the elderberries to freeze for bulk sales. (Reach out if you are looking for a quantity for processing.) We also got the 2500 strawberry tips transplanted into trays and set up the misting system that keeps a light mist on their leaves every 5 minutes. They are a big project a few times of year and this is one of them. But once they are all tucked in, it’s cool to watch the misting system work well, keeping those leaves moist so the roots can form. Once the root systems have developed, in a few weeks we will transplant them into the outdoor beds so they can establish well in the field before winter. Ryan got in many fields of cover crop seeding in places that harvests are finished for the season. It’s nice to get them in this early to have a good establishment before the winter. We also seeded hundreds of trays of winter greens to transplant next month. And the team caught up with some important weeding that was a bit overdue.

We are really enjoying everything that we are harvesting this summer. So many crops are doing well that we historically have not been so great at. Like eggplant! How fun! This winter will definitely be the winter of eggplant in our house. I take all the “farmer quality” veggies to preserve in some way for the winter. So far we have grilled eggplant to freeze for winter baingan bharta meals or baba gnoush snacks, roasted eggplant that I peeled and froze to make eggplant meatballs and roasted eggplant soup later, dried eggplant slices that are tossed with olive oil and salt for snacks, and battered and baked eggplant slices for winter eggplant parmesan…. I love, love eggplant, and we haven’t had such an awesome harvest of them before.

This week was Molly’s last week working at the farm. Next week she starts work at the Vermont Food Bank, and we will miss all her gifts and hard work on this team as she brings those over to the important work of the Food Bank. Molly has worked on the Evening Song Farm team for four seasons, helping us make the transition onto the CSA software platform we use now and managing the system of ordered and delivered CSA bags when it was totally new after we dropped farmers’ markets during the pandemic. She has also been responsible for most of the art around the farm, making it a more bright and colorful place to work. Molly came to this team after running her own art business, and now she heads into a different part of the food access world, and we have no doubt she will rock at it. Thanks for all your hard work and creativity over the years, Molly!

Have a great week,

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

Weekly Recipe

We ferment a lot of veggies, but if you are new to fermentation, I tried to write a few descriptive tips in the recipe below. If you want to get into fermentation, we recommend the book Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz.

Fermented Jalapeño Hot Sauce