3rd Week of the Fall CSA Season: Week of October 29th

Oct 24

Written By Evening Song Farm

*beautiful rainbow morning on Thursday, photo by Ryan*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: green curly kale, lacinato kale, rainbow chard, caraflex cabbage, green cabbage, bok choi, arugula, baby lettuce, spinach
Roots: red beets, yellow beets, carrots, watermelon radish, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, French fingerling potato, sweet potatoes, daikon radish, Gilfeather turnip, rutabaga, red radishes, parsnip
Alliums: garlic, yellow onions, red onions, scallions, shallots, leeks
Herbs: cilantro
Miscellaneous: fennel
Fruiting crops: jalapeno peppers, serrano peppeers, aji rico hot peppers, poblano peppers, shishito peppers, red carmen sweet peppers, tomatillos, delicata squash, butternut squash
This week, you can order some items in bulk if you do any preserving. We listed bulk jalapeno peppers, and onions. (This may be the last week for peppers.) If you pick up in the barn, feel free to send us an email to order bulk items with the volumes you want, and what day we should have it ready in the barn, and we will give you your total and where to find it in the barn.

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

*still plenty of butternut squash in the storage bins, photo by Kara*

*same goes for the delicata in bulk crates in the root cellar, photo by Kara*

Farm News

We have been cruising through the bulk carrot harvest, and they are gorgeous, making their way from the field, through the barrel washer, and into bags in the root cellar. On the rainy days this week the team cracked up all seed garlic for planting, finished trimming and storing the cured onions, and started some weeding in the tunnel greens. The rain was obviously welcome, and we can still use some more at that same, slow and gentle pace.

Ryan and Cindy snuck in a repair project at the end of the week: replacing the arbor that our grapes grow on. It was built about 10 years ago as a roof cover to our pizza oven and transitioned to a grape arbor. They also rebuilt the giant customized pallet we use on the front of our tractor to move all the mulch from the mulch piles to the fields. That tool does a lot of (literal) heavy lifting around here, and needed a good rehab.

Two weeks ago when we started harvesting the brussels sprouts, there was more aphid damage than we wanted… We were hopping around to the plants that looks the best, but we were generally disappointed by how much we couldn’t harvest. But this week, we found a section of the brussels sprout field that look great, and it looks like we will have a few weeks worth of these really nice brussels sprouts that aren’t affected by the aphids. So if your first week of brussels sprouts had some aphids that we missed as we sorted them, you will probably appreciate the ones we have the next couple weeks a little more.

My attention this week was pulled from vegetable production to one of our older dogs, Echo, who turns 15 in a couple weeks. For those of you who pick up at the barn, you may know him as the lump of sweet dog that splays out on the barn landing entrance that you sometimes have to step over to get your veggies. He’s doing great now, but last weekend, he deteriorated quickly when he became diabetic. Thankfully, I love enough diabetic humans to have spotted the early symptoms quickly, and was able to get him the treatment he needed. Once he was stabilized, he was happy to be home, and got right back to work: following us up to the field and sitting down overseeing all of us harvesting a field of brussels sprouts. He is happiest when all his people are together, so he can relax near everyone. Echo has been with us since the first winter before we started our CSA down on Route 103, so we appreciate any time we get to have together. (Check the cute picture at the bottom of the newsletter.) 15 years ago, we spent months visiting rescues and shelters around the region to find the right dog who would be a friendly ambassador welcoming CSA members at the farm in a non-intimidating, low-excitement way, while also being a working hunter to help keep our fields free of field rodents, groundhogs, rabbits, and deer. After what felt like meeting a zillion dogs, I started to wonder if I was being too selective, trying to find a unicorn, when really so many pups are a delight to welcome into a family. But then one day we showed up at a rescue near Montpelier to a pile of cute, fluffy puppies, and there was this solo puppy in the corner, just doing his own thing. We were drawn to his energy of “I am super cute, but I don’t really need to make a fuss about myself” and it felt clear this was our dude. Once he finished those high energy puppy years of eating all our shoes and work gloves, we were certain he was the right addition to our farm fam. We are grateful for the magic of insulin and the time we get to live together. It’s nice to see him back on his feet, watching us from all his favorite spots around the farm.

Have a great week,

-ESF Team: Kara, Ryan, K2, Cindy, Taylor, Leah, Natalie, Katie, Galen, Vanessa, Georgia, Amelia, Kristina, and Hannah (and Sky and Soraya)

Mashed Potatoes- Rutabaga Style!

We love adding variations to mashed potatoes. When I don’t have fresh parsley for this recipe I used chopped scallions.