14th Week of the Summer CSA Season: Week of August 25th

Aug 21

Written By Evening Song Farm

hummingbird resting on a flower, photo by Adam Ford

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, green curly kale bunches, rainbow chard, green head lettuce, pea shoots, romaine, arugula, green cabbage
Roots: new red potatoes, red beet bunches, yellow beet bunches
Alliums: scallions, yellow onions, red onions, sweet onions, fresh garlic bulbs, shallots, leeks
Herbs: sage, parsley, basil tops, bulk pesto basil, cilantro
Fruiting crops: zucchini, summer squash, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, Japanese cucumbers, heirloom tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, roma tomatoes, tomatillos
Miscellaneous: rhubarb, celery

Crop Report

This week brings back a few vegetables that have been on hiatus for a bit: cilantro, arugula, and cabbage. Also new this week are shallots and leeks, which grew amazingly well this year. The beets are smaller in size for the next few weeks. We’re waiting for the outdoor peppers to ripen before we’ll have more red carmen peppers, and next week will be the official end of the longest lull in carrots our farm has ever seen. Let us all delight in the incredible variety and abundance of tomatoes!

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

*much smaller visiting friend on a flower, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This week was our first week back after a 12-day trip out to visit friends and family in Wisconsin, Chicago, and Ohio, and the team held down the wildness of this place like the pros they are. We are incredibly lucky to be veggie farmers that get to sneak away at the height of the growing season. We traveled with a ton of the veggies from here, and our car was much more spacious on the way home as we snacked on the last Carmen pepper we brought for snacking. Driving through the midwest along rolling fields of corn, corn, soybeans, and more corn, reminded us how small our farm is, how much of a tiny little blip it is in the food system. So much of that corn goes to raise commercial meat and produce ethanol, and sometimes I like to squint my eyes and imagine all the little diversified family farms that used to dot that landscape before (probably the worst Secretary of Agriculture) Earl Butz and the “get big or get out” campaign in the 1970s ravaged the working landscape, national food system, and ultimately our bodies and communities. Every little home garden we drove by after we left the interstate and wound around the rural roads in the Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin felt like a mighty act of delicious resistance. Being a member of a CSA, and for some of you also having a home garden, we are all part of the web that is building something more resilient, more nutritious, more respectful of the earth, and I was reminded of that hopefulness as I drove by looking at what the majority of the agricultural acres in the country are actually doing.

In between swims in Great Lakes and paddles down the north fork of the Kickapoo River, we learned that our farm gets to be part of a regional cohort with 9 other farms from Rutland and Bennington Counties through a program run by NOFA-VT to address resilience planning in the face of a chaotic climate. If you have read these newsletters, you know we have already been geeking out over climate resilience planning for years, but all our work is magnified when collaborating with peers. We are excited to get together with other farms in this cohort to more closely know what other farms have been experimenting with or hope to try out.

This week and last week the team did some catch up weeding some zones that were recently prepared with some new field prep techniques Ryan is trying out. We also got all our onions and shallots harvested and started curing in the prop house. Early this week we will send out about 3 cargo van loads of veggies to the Vermont Food Bank, and we LOVE that they are able to distribute fresh, local, certified organic produce to folks experiencing food insecurity.

The tomatoes have hit that wild time of year where they are rolling in at a wild rate…. This is the time of year where we re-evaluate if we grow too many tomatoes… But that query really only lasts for a week or two, and the rest of the season we are wishing we planted more, ha!

Have a great week,

-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, Vanessa, Taylor, Katie, Galen, Leah, Natalie, Cindy, Amelia, Morgan, Hannah, and Grandpa Jim the delivery guy (and Sky and Soraya)

Bruschetta

We like having a nice fresh salsa available in the fridge this time of year