20th (LAST) Week of the Summer CSA Season: Week of October 7th

Oct 4

*leeks in the upper tunnel field, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

Greens: green curly kale, lacinato kale, rainbow chard, head lettuce, caraflex cabbage, green cabbage, bok choi, arugula, baby lettuce, napa cabbage, spinach
Roots: red beets, yellow beets, carrots, watermelon radish, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, French fingerling potato, sweet potatoes, daikon radish, Gilfeather turnip, rutabaga
Alliums: garlic, yellow onions, sweet onions, red onions, scallions, shallots, leeks
Herbs: sage, cilantro, thyme
Miscellaneous: celery, fennel
Fruiting crops: heirloom tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, red roma paste tomatoes, midnight roma tomatoes, green tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, shishito peppers, carmen sweet peppers, green carmen peppers, tomatillos, husk cherries, spaghetti squash, delicata squash, butternut squash

**The heirloom tomatoes are slowing way down, so we may have to substitute them for beefsteak or roma if you order them, so indicate your sub preference in the order form.

This week, you can order some items in bulk if you do any preserving. We listed bulk red carmen peppers, jalapeno peppers, beefsteak tomatoes, roma tomatoes, and onions. 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

Here are some of the turkeys who have been living on the farm this summer, scratching up all the newly planted seeds, ravaging pea shoot plantings, getting stuck in a high tunnel, generally being less welcomed garden guests… But they have spent so much time here this season that our dogs, (who are in charge of deterring rodents, deer, groundhogs, and other garden visitors, including turkeys!) now have a nice, neighborly rapport with them, instead of chasing them out of the fields as we would like, ha! The first morning I noticed this change in relationship this summer, a big flock of turkeys were behind our house making their way through the ground cherry/tomatillo/pepper field, so I waved the dogs out of the house and pointed to the giant flock of delicious, juicy prey 20 feet away, and told them to get to it. They gingerly trotted off the back porch, waltzed up to the turkeys, tails wagging, as the turkeys turned and hopped over to them… sniffing, inspecting, tail wagging, and do-see-do-ing ensued, and then turkeys and dogs trotted up and down the rows of veggies together like some hilarious, harmonious cartoon…. thanks, dogs…. photo by Adam Ford

Farm News

Thank you! Thank you for joining us for the summer CSA season. The CSA program is the backbone of Evening Song Farm, and you are part of that! We have relied on the CSA model since our very first year running a production vegetable farm in Pennsylvania, and it continues to be our favorite way to orient our vegetable production. So, thank you for your support this year. If you are planning to do the fall season (which starts next week), and haven’t signed up yet, do that now, or reach out if you need help signing up. If you just do the summer season, thank you, and we hope you have a lovely fall and winter.

This week we got a jump on some of the bulk harvests, starting with sweet potatoes. They are now curing at about 80 degrees for about a week, before we can move them to 60 degree storage. It’s handy to have extra cooler space that we can empty and set to the particular temperatures for a crop like this that needs specifications that no other veggie we grow needs. Then we jumped into starting the bulk carrot harvest, which was shrunk down thanks to the helping hands of the neighborhood deer herd, ha. (We will still have lots of great carrots, maybe only a few hundred pounds less than we were anticipating.) It’s been really nice to get to start these harvests with such beautiful, sunny, warm weather.

As the weeks go on, we will work on getting watermelon radish, daikon radish, gilfeather turnip, rutabaga, leeks, cabbage, potatoes, and brussels sprouts all harvested and stored in their various spots in the root cellar. And we will also put almost 200 pounds of garlic seed in the ground and get it mulched.

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)

Slow Roasted Roma Tomatoes

I am making this recipe as I type this newsletter, and the house smells delicious!