7th Week of the Fall CSA Season: Week of November 25th

Nov 21

Written By Evening Song Farm

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: green curly kale, rainbow chard, caraflex cabbage, green cabbage, bok choi, baby lettuce, spinach, baby kale, brussels crowns, claytonia
Roots: red beets, yellow beets, carrots, watermelon radish, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, French fingerling potato, daikon radish, Gilfeather turnip, rutabaga, parsnip
Alliums: garlic, yellow onions, red onions, shallots, leeks
Herbs: cilantro, parsley
Miscellaneous: fennel

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

*Welcome to the barn, photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

At least once a year we like to share our gratitude with our CSA members for the ways that you are an essential ingredient to this farm, and how your food choices support your wider community, and what better week to share our gratitude than Thanksgiving week!

At Evening Song Farm, we move about 70% of the produce we grow through our CSA program. From our first year running a market garden in Pennsylvania to today, the CSA model has been the focus of our vegetable growing because we appreciate the relationship it builds with all of you. Your commitment to a whole season of veggies, (or all 44 weeks if you do all 3 seasons), provides a stability to our growing production plans that wouldn’t be there if we were only a wholesale or farmers’ market farm. As we harvest and re-harvest and re-harvest again throughout the week to keep the display coolers stocked in the barn and pack CSA bags out for delivery, we are humbled by the volume of food we get to send out to SO MANY people in the area. THANK YOU for choosing to get your veggies with us. We appreciate your support, and enjoy imagining all the colorful tables this food ends up on.

Your decision to get your veggies here supports a local business that hires 12 full- or part-time farmers throughout the year. You are supporting a farm that focuses on building soil for the future with growing methods that maximize carbon sequestration within annual crop production, whose energy use is predominantly from renewable sources, and land management strategies that maximize biodiversity and wildlife habitat. And the shiniest accolades I enjoy showering on you, are how intertwined local farm production is with charitable food distribution: As a farm, we have to plan for a certain amount of over production for each crop. That way when the aphids, potato beetles, leek moths, tomato horn worms, flea beetles, cabbage worms, squash bugs, cut worms, voles, mice, ground hogs, deer, wild turkeys, droughts, floods, hail, powdery mildew, botrytis, anthracnose, bacterial wilt (whoops, I went on a detour! reeling myself back in here!), impact the planned yield for a given crop, we will still have enough to provide for everyone in the CSA. But, a lot of the time, things work out, and we will have more than we need for our CSA and wholesale needs. We can send this surplus production out to the various charitable food outlets we have partnered with over the years. So just by being a CSA member, you are keeping a farm operation going that has a reliable by-product of charitable food donations: Your food choices feed your less food secure regional neighbors. Pat yourself on the back for that one!

When our family sits down to our Thanksgiving meal, I love imagining all the other tables around the area that have the same vegetables on them, that came from the same 4 acres of soil on this hillside below Copperas Hill. It’s cool to close my eyes and imagine what many of your tables will look like to that day.

Thank you for being part of this CSA, and I hope you have a nourishing and relaxing Thanksgiving.

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)

Chimichurri

Want to jazz up your traditional Thanksgiving menu? Just have a batch of chimichurri for the table…. Great on turkey, a spoonful mixed into mashed potatoes, dolloped on roasted veggies, as a dip for stuffing, rolled into crescent rolls with cheddar cheese, etc…