2nd Week of the Fall CSA season: Week of October 21st

Oct 18

Written By Evening Song Farm

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: baby lettuce, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale, rainbow chard, pea shoots, green cabbage, giant green cabbage, bok choi, brussels crowns, brussels sprouts, green leaf lettuce, romaine lettuce, spinach
Roots: red potatoes, yellow potatoes, red beets, yellow beets, carrots, baby carrots, parsnips, watermelon radish, mini daikon radish, Gilfeather turnips, rutabaga
Alliums: yellow onions, red onions, sweet onions, fresh garlic bulbs, shallots, leeks
Herbs: sage, parsley, thyme
Fruiting crops: shishito peppers, jalapeno peppers, ripening sweet green to red Italian Carmen peppers, aji rico red hot peppers, green Italian peppers, butternut squash, delicata squash, spaghetti squash
Miscellaneous: fennel

Crop Report

This may be the last week of pepper varieties, so enjoy them while they are here. (This will be the last week of bulk peppers available if you freeze any sweet peppers for the winter, or make hot sauce.) With the first low 20s night, we put layers of row cover over the tender outdoor greens and hope for the best. Sometimes nature blasts our best plans for greens harvesting, (and the greens in the tunnel aren’t ready to harvest yet), so if anything turns out to be damaged when we uncover to harvest, there may be some substitutions, but I am optimizitic that everything made it through. For anyone who is new to the fall CSA season and didn’t get to see our description of brussels crowns (versus brussels sprouts), they are the top part of the brussels sprout and used as a cooking green.. like collard greens or kale, but tastes like brussels sprouts. They are delightful sauteed with garlic and olive oil. The head lettuce varieties have been espcially delightful. (Fingers crossed all the row cover kept them happy enough overnight with these low 20s!) Gilfeather turnip, rutabaga, and daikon radish are all new this week. Daikon is a mild radish, eaten raw and popularly fermented. Gilfeather and rutabaga are similar (probably because Gilfeather is botanically a rutabaga, not a turnip), and are one of my favorite veggies to roast. I also love adding them added to mashed potatoes for a blended flavor. I also just have to shout out the parsnips after our family eat a delicious parsnip mac and cheese with pureed parsnips used as the thickener for the cheese sauce. So good. (It’s just like the Gilfeather mac and cheese recipe below, but using parsnips instead of Gilfeather. I have also used yellow beets in that recipe.)

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

*hear comes the cold, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

This past we were busily harvesting, washing, and packing out 576 pounds of carrots, 288 pounds of baby lettuce, and 288 bunches of green curly kale to the Vermont Foodbank. Turns out it takes a little bit of time to get 1152 pounds of vegetables harvested and packed into retail size packages to distribute throughout Vermont. I feel grateful to live in a state with such a robust charitable food infrastructure and knowing this great stuff is getting to folks in need. We do a few of these big loads throughout the year for the Foodbank, but it’s really nice when it happens this time of year, when we don’t have to juggle the time commitment of such a big order with the demands of weeding, trellising tomatoes, picking tomatoes, etc.

This week we will mostly be able to turn our attention to bulk harvesting all the fall crops to get them into the root cellar for storage and distribution throughout the fall and spring CSA seasons. This year we are going to experiment with storing some of our carrots dirty to see if we get better storage results: every spring we have to sort through bags of storage carrots and rewash most because there may be a couple carrots that didn’t make it, and became nasty carrot mush in the bags. It’s a bummer becuase we put such wonderful, pristine carrots in the bags this time of year, and it would be awesome if we could really success at storage. So some of this week’s harvest will go in dirty to see how that turns out this spring. We may also harvest most of the parsnips for storage instead of letting as many stay in the field over winter. The trade off is that they get especially sweet when they are left to stay in the ground dug in the spring, but last year when we did that, the spring dug ones had so much surface damage from the carrot rust fly larvae. Some of their starches will still convert to sugars in root cellar storage, so it might be worth the fall harvest to avoid that same damage as last year.

The most fun (and daunting?) news for this week is that we learned we secured grant funding to insulate the CSA barn! I have been applying for grants for a couple years to make this infrastructure update, and it’s pretty cool it has finally come to fruition. It won’t cover the whole project but it will make it affordable. Having an uninsulated distribution space is tricky during the fall and spring. Currently we have to wrap the display coolers with down comforters and row cover during the nights that it dips below the 20s, and this is a super pain. We also have to move all the items outside of the display cooler (wonderfully heavy things like onions, garlic, squash, etc) into warmer spaces overnight. We have to put space heaters on timers in all the coolers to prevent them from freezing through in the deep winter. We have to move all our electronics in and out of the space to keep the batteries from freezing. And this is just is just one aspect of the headache of an uninsulated space. But it’s also daunting to finally score funding for it because it’s an enormous project, and will be super tricky to do in a space that is currently used all the time. We will have to strategically map out how to do it in phases without disrupting all the work occurs in there, and the biggest question we keep going back in forth on is whether we insulate from this inside or the outside. (It makes me wish we just insulated the barn when we built it, but back then we were counting dimes, and it was just not in the cards.) Either way, a real opporuntiy to score this grant, and we look forward to a better work space by next year!

Have a great week,

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

If you signed up for the season after the newsletter went out last week, and didn’t get the CSA nuts and bolts below, I am copying it below, and then I promise not to bog future fall newsletters with this info. Many common questions are answered with the info below, so if you are new or appreicate refreshers, here you go:

If you pick up at the barn:

To get to the barn, our address “48 Nice Road, Cuttingsville VT.” Pull up to the barn on the right, and go up the ramp, and the veggies will be displayed in the display cooler and tables. Find your name on the check off sheet. (Let us know if you can't find your name, or if it's not the share size you planned for.)
During the fall CSA season, the veggies are set up in the barn on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 9am to 8pm. (Not Tuesdays, like summer.)
If you miss a week, please feel free to make up those items when it works for you by keeping track of the items you miss and making them up when you want.
You can buy extra items at the barn by leaving money in the cash box at the CSA sign in area. (If you use Venmo for those extra purchases, make sure your Venmo transaction goes through.)
You may also see some other products (bread, yogurt, cheese, pizza, coffee, veggie burgers, eggs, blueberries, and certified organic grass-fed beef) from neighbor farms. You can purchase those items as extras, and leave payment in the cash box at pickup. These aren’t interchangeable with CSA veggie items. (If you use a check you can still make it out to Evening Song Farm.)
If you have any accessibility issues when picking up your veggies, please let us know so we can support you. Try our cell phones (802-342-4304 and 802-585-7045) if you need immediate assistance while you are there and no one is working nearby. Or send us an email with general accessibility suggestions. We want vegetable acquisition to be easy and joyful.

If you place a weekly order for delivery to Rutland or Ludlow:

Each week, you log onto your dashboard to select the items you want in your bag that week. You will receive a confirmation email of your order if the order went in successfully.
You can order extra items any week, and at checkout, it will prompt you for payment only for the extra items that are more than the CSA size you signed up for.
If you don't receive a weekly email for some reason, you can always go to our website and click on the "CSA Member Login" button on the top right to order your veggies. Also, all weekly newsletters are posted on the website under the "CSA" tab, with the "Weekly CSA Newsletter" subheading.
If you miss a week you can place a "hold" on the week you will miss, and schedule a makeup week. Create your hold for a day before and after the delivery day, otherwise you will get auto email reminders to place an order. (If you need help with that, feel free to reach out.)
You can change your pickup location any week by signing into your account and finding the "summary box" over towards the right.
The online platform shuts off at noon on Tuesdays for a Wednesday delivery, and midnight on Wednesday for a Friday delivery. (An auto email goes out after those deadlines pass to collect any orders that you may want to place if you didn't get to place an order online. Don't feel bad if you get that email-- we love getting you your veggies!)
You can use the comment section when you place your order to list a preferred substitution in case we aren't able to harvest something on your weekly order. (We do our best to make a guess of what we can harvest 4 to 6 days before we harvest and pack, so sometimes something on the order form may not actually be available on packing day. Nature keeps us on our toes.) If you do not list a preferred substitute, and we aren't able to harvest an item on your list, we will substitute it with something that is generally popular.
Keep in mind that bags delivered to Rutland and Ludlow are not in coolers once they are dropped off, and the delivery sites are doing us a favor by providing space for bags. Make your best effort to get your bag the day we drop it off. Bags arrive in Ludlow by 1pm and are on the side porch of OMS. Bags arrive at the Rutland Co-op by noon on delivery day, and they are open until 7pm. (Sometimes, but not all the time, any bags not picked up by the end of the day get moved into their drink cooler when they close up. When you do make it to the co-op to pick up if your bag isn't still on the racks in the hallway, ask someone up front to find it in their cooler for you.)

For all CSA members:

We appreciate hearing from you if you ever get a bad veggie. If you pick up at the barn, please feel free to take an extra item to make up for a bad item. If you get a delivered bag, mention it in the order comments, and list an extra item we can pack to replace it. Similarly, if you get a packed bag and it's missing an item, let us know so we can make that up. Thanks!
If you want to adjust your share size, you can do that yourself on your Farmigo account, or reach out to us, and we can do that for you. Our theme is flexibility.

Gilfeather mac and cheese