Green is my favorite color, and this particular picture of claytonia growing int he high tunnel is especially enchanting to me… How magical that this delicate, delightful, fresh green does great under layers of row cover, in the cold, during the time of year with the shortest amount of sunlight…. I love eating this green in my salad and sandwiches in the winter, but I love even more watching my nephew or my kids eat it by the fistful like potato chips, photo by Adam Ford

CSA Balance Due

Only 2 more weeks of this season are left, please finish paying now, so we don’t have to follow up in the new year. Thanks!

If you haven’t already paid, your balance is due this week. 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. Unless you email us with your payment plan, or set up a payment plan on the Farmigo dashboard, please pay for the entire season now. It saves us valuable farm work time to have payments at the beginning of the season or on a planned payment schedule. Thank you!

If you are able to pay with a check, e-check, cash, Venmo, or EBT, it saves us a considerable amount of money compared to card transactions. We know that it’s necessary for some folks to use a card, so don’t feel bad if you have to use that option. Thanks!

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have yellow potatoes, red potatoes, baby kale, claytonia, Tokyo Bekana, baby tat soi, mesclun mix, baby lettuce, pea shoots, green curly kale bunches, lacinato kale, garlic, leeks, carrots, baby carrots, Painted Mountain grain corn, brussels sprouts, watermelon radish, daikon radish, spinach, mini red lettuce heads, mini green lettuce heads, green cabbage, rutabaga, yellow onions, and Gilfeather turnip.

*You can still choose between cleaned up green brussels sprouts and U-Trim brussels sprouts with outer yellow leaves. The entire rest of the brussels sprout is fine. This is a very slow, time consuming step to take for the 100+ pints of brussels sprouts we clean up each week, but it’s not a big deal when I bring a pint or two into my house to clean up for dinner… this way you can get twice as many brussels sprouts for your item ordered, but you will have to take a few minutes to remove the outer yellow leaves on them. Last week we heard that some actually bad brussels sprouts snuck their way into someone’s quart of brussels, but we should be sorting more effectively this week.

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 Wednesdays or Thursdays to pick out your items yourself.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Farm News

Including this week, there are two weeks left of the fall CSA share. If you have items to make up, consider taking a bunch of items that store well for awhile. Garlic and onions store well for weeks on a counter. Potatoes, carrots, rutabaga, cabbage, Gilfeather turnip, daikon radish, and watermelon radish all store for months in a fridge, as long as they are in a produce drawer or wrapped in plastic to prevent desication. (The lacinato and green curly kale can last for a couple weeks in the fridge, but if you are making up a lot of items I would lean towards more of those root crops and alliums.) It’s easier on our end dealing with the CSA software system if you can make up your missed items within the season that you missed them, but reach out if you think that would be hard to do.

It’s always a bit of a dance this time of year to figure out what volume of greens to offer on our wholesale list for the chefs and retail outlets who source veggies from us… we prioritize making sure we have enough greens first for our CSA through the end of the fall CSA season, but then we don’t want to have any uncut by the time January hits, because we need those greens to start, slowly, slowly, very slowly regrowing for re-harvesting in March. In the summer we may be able to re-harvest from the same bed of baby lettuce just 2-3 week apart, but this time of year, it’s more like a 2-3 months turn around. Ryan has really dialed in those predictions in terms of what to harvest versus space out for CSA weeks, so it’s looking good for the rest of this season.

This week we will finish harvesting the lacinato kale from outdoors, and we have been really impressed with how gorgeous it has been. Lots of row cover helps, and it also helps that we haven’t had temperatures in the single digits yet. In comparing weather notes from years past, this has been a pretty mild December… not unexpected, but also I imagine that as colder seasons continue to express the projected mild future trend based on climate models, it will always feel a blend of weird and normal all wrapped up together. I know weather and climate are different, but it is still noticeable, through the lens of seasonal vegetable production, that certain things are more possible now to grow well during this time of year, than even when we moved to this area 12+ years ago. And that’s a pretty fast change.

We have been moving through a great volume of storage veggies in the root cellar, which is fantastic for several reasons, but not the least of which is that by the end of January we are already setting up grow room in the root cellar basement for the earliest seed starting. That amazement doesn’t get old to me from year to year: that each season blends into the next… while we are finishing up cleaning up winter storage cabbage, we are also starting the seeds for next years outdoor plantings. I love the smells of each season as well….. When we start setting up the grow room with full spectrum lights and potting media, and seedlings, it really smells like opportunity, new beginnings, excitement, and my olfactory memories can conjure those smells just thinking about it, even though the root cellar is still full of storage veggies for now. It makes the winter months much more delightful to me to have this work happening throughout the year, tying all the abundance of summer into these months with fewer hours of sunlight. Here’s to that sunlight starting to return bit by bit this week.

Have a great week,

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

Mashed Potatoes with Kale

This recipe lists using baby kale, but any kale will do.