Saturday, January 7th, Winter Distribution #3

The News from Windflower Farm

Happy New Year from Windflower Farm! Your third and final CSA delivery of the winter season will be arriving this Saturday.

If you cannot get to the site during the distribution window, please arrange to have someone pick up your share for you. Pickup times are noted below. All shares left after the pickup time will be donated to neighbors in need. We hope you enjoy your share.

Your pick-up time and location are noted below:

Central Brooklyn (1251 Dean St., 4:30 to 6:00)

What’s in your box?

  • Ruby Frost apples plus either Jonagolds or Empires
  • A jar of organic jelly from the kitchen of our neighbor Deb
  • Butternut squash
  • Celeriac
  • Carrots, kohlrabi and Watermelon radishes
  • French Fingerling potatoes and Covington sweet potatoes
  • Yellow onions and Ed’s Red shallots
  • Spinach and Toscano kale

The carrots and celeriac were grown using organic practices by our friends at Denison Farm.  The apples were grown by the Borden family and are not organic. All of the other vegetables were grown by us and are certified organically grown.  

French fingerling potatoes look very much like small sweet potatoes. Examine them long enough and you’ll see their differences. But if you still can’t, slice them open. The flesh of this potato variety is yellow, and the flesh of the Covington sweet potato is orange.

What’s new on the farm?

Snow has come and gone. The ground has frozen to a depth of three or four inches, but now it has thawed and become muddy. It’s been a strange start to winter. Our cover crops are happy to be out from under the snow and are again green. But our fall-planted garlic, onion, shallot and strawberry crops are not as happy to see the snow go. Their mulch is not enough. Robert Frost’s wish that his apples stay cold – “Better forty below than forty above”- is about the vulnerability of plants in the winter. Alternating warm and cold temperatures, something likely to occur with greater frequency in a warming world. Hope for snow. It protects plants from temperature extremes, it brightens the landscape and, besides, Nate and I bought ski passes for the very first time this year and we’d like to go skiing!

Thank you very much for being with us. We hope you’ve enjoyed your winter boxes, and we wish you and yours a happy and healthy new year!

We look forward to seeing you in June, Ted and Jan

Saturday, December 10, Winter Distribution #2

Greetings from Windflower Farm! Your second CSA delivery of the winter season will be arriving this Saturday. 

If you cannot get to the site during the distribution window, please arrange to have someone pick up your share for you. Pickup times are noted below. All shares left after the pickup time will be donated to neighbors in need. We hope you enjoy your share.

What’s in your box?

  • A bagful of apples from the Borden’s farm, including Empires and Honey Crisps
  • A jar of honey from Derek Woodcock at Harry’s Honey House
  • And from our farm:
  • Butternut squash
  • A bag of sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes
  • A bag of shallots and another of mixed yellow and red onions
  • A bag of kale from our unheated greenhouse
  • And a bag containing Denison Farm carrots, our beets and the last of our ginger

Next month, you’ll get spinach and lacinato kale, celeriac, kohlrabi and watermelon radishes, Ruby Frost and Jonagold apples, a jar of Deb’s homemade organic jam and a host of the usual winter vegetables (onions, potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes, shallots, squash and beets).

What’s new on the farm?

December is our month for gathering supplies for the coming farm season. This week, it’s soil mix. On Monday, I travelled to Montpellier, Vermont to pick up the compost-based soil mix we’ve used for more than 20 years. Karl Hammer, who runs Vermont Compost, has been making some of the very best organic soil media for vegetable seed starting anywhere. We’ll post a couple of images on our Instagram page, including a shot of the pretty state capitol building. Next week, we’ll collect the row covers, mulches, organic fertilizers and drip irrigation supplies we’ll need. And later in the month, in what is our most important job of the winter, we’ll order all of our seeds. Which means we will have taken the lessons learned from previous seasons and the input from our shareholders and produced a crop plan that we hope will put us on track for a super 2023 farm season.     

Wishing you and yours a happy holiday season and a healthy new year, Ted and Jan

Pickup time and place for Central Brooklyn is:
1251 Dean St., 4:30 to 6:00

Saturday, November 19, Winter Distribution #1

The News from Windflower Farm

Thank you for joining us for the winter CSA season. We hope you enjoy the healthy farm fresh goodies that come your way during each of the next three months. We’ve closed our winter share signup site and tallied the numbers. We’ll be packing 430 boxes this winter, exceeding expectations. Thank you for your support of our work. Your first winter share will be delivered this Saturday, November 19th.

Your pick-up time and location is noted below:

Central Brooklyn CSA (1251 Dean St., 4:30 to 6:00)

The next winter share distributions will be on Saturday December 10th and January 7th.

Please note: 

  1. A friend, family member or neighbor can pick up your share for you if you are not able to make it to distribution. Please ask this person to sign-in under your name.
  2. Site hosts are not obliged to save shares for members who miss the distribution window. Any shares leftover after distribution will be donated to community fridges or food pantries and will help other community members in need. 
  3. The farm is not able to send you a make-up share if you miss a distribution. The farm will send your shares on the distribution dates only. 
  4. The farm will send you a newsletter a day or two before distribution. Please save these two emails to your preferred contacts list: windflowercsa@gmail.com and tedblomgren@gmail.com and check your SPAM folder if our newsletter does not make it into your inbox.
  5. Watch for updates from site hosts on social media. Many sites post updates about the share on Instagram and Facebook.

What’s in your box?

  • Red Russian kale, Lacinato kale and bok choy all packed in a plastic bag
  • Potatoes and sweet potatoes packed in paper
  • Carrots, orange beets and ginger in a plastic bag
  • Yellow onions, shallots and the last of our garlic in a net bag
  • Borden Farm ‘Jonagold’ and ‘Empire’ apples packed in paper
  • Rosemary and butternut squash packed loose
  • Borden Farm apple cider packed separately

News from the farm

Jan and Nate made a fantastic soup from Soups On! called “Vietnamese Pho Real Bowl” using the ginger, bok choy, shallots and carrots in this month’s share. You’ll also need cilantro, mushrooms, rice or rice noodles and vegetable stock. Several variations can be found online.

A hard frost and our first snowstorm of the year arrived this week. Last week, temperatures were in the 60s, and I thought we might be harvesting spinach and ‘Premo’ kale from the field. Instead, we’ll be harvesting ‘Lacinato’ and ‘Red Russian’ kale and bok choy from our small “caterpillar” greenhouses. After a week’s break from the summer CSA schedule, we’ve reconvened this week to harvest Rosemary and greens and to sort and bag your storage vegetables. While everything in your share (apart from the fruit) is organically grown, and most is grown here, it is not all grown by us. The carrots in this month’s share were grown by friends Brian and Justine Denison. More will be in next month’s share along with some of their gorgeous celeriac.

Our cover crops have filled in, carpeting the farm in green ahead of the snow. Our winter greens have been covered against the cold, and our storage vegetables have been tucked away. The row covers we use to protect crops from the cold and winds and pest insects have been sorted – the good, the bad and the good enough – and tucked by the barn. Plastic mulches have been picked up, drip tape has been rolled up for re-use, farm equipment has been put away and broken gadgets placed by the workshop for repair. We are prepared for the cold season ahead. Our work is done. And now it’s time to kick back a little and to enjoy family and friends around the holiday table.

Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving, Ted and Jan

Week of October 31, Distribution #22

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in your share?

  • Spinach
  • Lettuce
  • Arugula
  • Kale
  • Beets
  • Potatoes
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Yellow onions
  • Ginger
  • Garlic
  • Rosemary
  • Cabbage

It’s winter share signup time! Read more about it below or follow this link to sign up: Windflower Farm’s 2022-2023 Winter Share (wufoo.com).

The black locusts were in full bloom when we sent our first shares this year and now, just as we are to send our final shares, they are among the last trees in our hedgerow to lose their leaves, going from green to gold to brown in quick order this past week. It is Sunday and the farm team appears especially happy today. There are smiles all around. It’s 65 degrees and sunny, and the end of a long season is near. We have harvested in snow in previous Octobers; this fall we have enjoyed one lovely day after another. Wednesday, after harvesting and packing your final boxes, we’ll gather for tacos and tamales and then scatter, some of us for just a couple of weeks, and some of us until the spring.

This week’s share is your last of the season. The farm team and I would like to express our gratitude to you for being a part of our CSA this year. We hope that you’ve enjoyed the experience. We would like to especially thank the volunteers in your neighborhood whose organizational efforts make the CSA happen and enable our farm livelihoods. Consider joining the core group at your site.

I still hope to get around to producing a survey that asks for your feedback about this year’s CSA shares and your overall CSA experience. If I don’t, please send me an email with the thoughts or suggestions that you think will help us improve in the future. Thank you.

Consider signing up for a winter share if you’d like to continue getting Windflower Farm vegetables for the next few months. If you choose not to, we hope to see you in the spring!

Wishing you a healthy winter season, Ted and the Windflower Farm team

Winter share news

It’s winter share signup season! A few years back, my friends at the Stanton Street CSA in the Lower East Side introduced me to the idea of “vegetable fatigue,” which they say can occur any time beginning around week 18 or 20 in the CSA season. Vegetable fatigue is a lack of enthusiasm for dealing with fresh vegetables. I completely understand. Going out to eat is the only remedy. A week or two to clear out the refrigerator helps.

Nevertheless, at the risk of wearing out our welcome, we offer a winter share. We finished planting our winter greenhouses on Friday morning. These are the greens that fill out the winter share. In total, we’ve planted four caterpillar tunnels and three high tunnels to a mix of choy, various kales and spinach – that’s twenty-three 140’ beds of greens. Every month, shares include a large bag of greens.

The winter share consists of three monthly deliveries that will include approximately 2 lb. of our organically grown greens (including spinach, a variety of kales and bok choy) and 8-10 lb. of our storage vegetables (including carrots, red and yellow onions, winter squash, a variety of potatoes, beets, leeks, sweet potatoes, shallots, and more), along with 4-6 lb. of fruits, and either apple cider, Deb’s homemade jelly made from her organic berries or local honey – all packed to fit in a returnable box – for $174.00

This year, we will only be offering three monthly deliveries instead of four. We have fewer crops going into storage and our farm team would like some time off.

We are minimizing our use of PLASTIC BAGS! We’ll pack loose where we can and use paper bags where we need packaging. Our GOAL will be to use zero plastic bags, but, because we want your salad greens to arrive fresh and we don’t have an alternative to plastic, we may use one plastic bag per month.

OPTIONAL shares include the EGG SHARE and MAPLE SHARE from Davis Family Farm and a GRAIN SHARE from Hickory Wind Farm (please see the details below).

Our deliveries are timed to coincide with the deliveries made to your CSA pickup site by Lewis-Waite Farm.

Take care, Ted

Week of October 24, Distribution #21

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in your share?

  • Butterhead lettuce
  • ‘Premo’ kale
  • Fingerling potatoes
  • Rosa di Milano onions
  • Rosemary or parsley
  • Garlic
  • Leeks
  • Butternut squash
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Chiles
  • Ginger
  • Carrots (our own babies if they have tops)

Looking back at the list of items we’d delivered over the season, Andrea noticed that I miscounted the number of weeks that we sent fruit. We did not start in week #1 as per usual. And for those of you at our Thursday sites, you’ll get a double share to make up for a recent missed week. So, it is this week that we deliver our final fruit shares. The share, which comes from Borden’s Farm, is comprised of Honey Crisp and Ginger Gold apples, two of my favorites.

This is the last CSA delivery for those of you who purchased half shares and pickup on odd weeks. I want to thank you very much for being with us and hope you have enjoyed this year’s offerings. For everyone else, next week’s will be your last delivery of the season. Information about our winter share and a sign-up link can be found below.  

We dug half of the ginger over the weekend, and Nate, who takes the lead with ginger, is washing it as I write. We’ll send it this week and next. If you need an idea for how to use it, you can add it to your favorite Thai recipe, candy it or make sugar snap cookies. Or you might make a turmeric-ginger tea to help lessen the severity of a cold and to reduce inflammation. This is fresh ginger; it is not as strongly flavored as the “mother” plants you’d get from the Tropics, nor does it keep very long. If you don’t intend to use it soon, freeze it, after which you can grate it into soups or other dishes.

The fall crops are now all in. Over the course of this week and next, we’ll cover those crops with a winter cold barrier, and finish cleaning up the farm. We have a few small greenhouses to take down and hundreds of yards of irrigation line to organize and tuck away for next year. Next Friday, four of our team head to Mexico for the winter. Soon Daren will head off to Poland to help in a Ukrainian refugee relief program. Andrea and her new husband will visit family in Germany. And the rest of us will take a bit of time off before diving into winter projects. Mine will be to restore a bunch of disused farm equipment for resale in the very active regional farmer-to-farmer marketplace.

The ginger crop reminds me of how far afield your money goes when you buy a CSA share at Windflower Farm. Our ginger seed pieces come from Biker Dude on the Big Island of Hawaii. And when his crop fails, he sources starts for us in Peru. We get sweet potato slips from North Carolina and Irish potato seed pieces from Moose Tubers in Maine. I am pleased that most of our suppliers can be found within a 200-mile radius of our farm. Our primary seed producers – Johnny’s, High Mowing and Fedco – are all in New England, but the seeds they sell, although increasingly local, can be from almost anywhere. The soil mix we use in our greenhouse is a blend we make using Vermont Compost in Montpellier and Fafard Organic Potting Mix from northern Quebec. Our cover crop seeds come from the Mid-Hudson, and our compost, which constitutes the lion’s share of our soil fertility program, comes from Western New York. When we buy produce, it always comes from nearby – your fruit comes from Yonder Farm in Columbia County and the Borden’s, who are 5 miles away, your beans, when they are not our own, come from Markristo Farm in the lower Teconics, and your carrots this year have come from up the road at Denison Farm.

There are two categories of expense on our P&L statement that are not local. One is fuel and the other is machinery. But even these expenses have elements that are local, including sales, delivery and repair. Economists have said that your local food dollars are spent 3 ½ times or more in the community before their economic benefit is exhausted. Our payroll and associated taxes and benefits represent by far our biggest expenses. If the supplies noted above and payroll together represent half a million dollars of CSA spending, which is about the case at our farm, the impact on our rural community might come in at close to two million dollars. I recall a co-founder of the NYC Greenmarkets telling me years ago that the city had always supported the countryside. I believe that to be true, but I also appreciate that this is a reciprocal arrangement.

I hope to get around to producing a survey that asks for your feedback about this year’s CSA shares and your overall CSA experience. If I don’t, please send me an email with the thoughts or suggestions that you think will help us improve in the future. Thank you.

Winter share news

It’s winter share signup season! A few years back, my friends at the Stanton Street CSA in the Lower East Side introduced me to the idea of “vegetable fatigue,” which they say can occur any time beginning around week 18 or 20 in the CSA season. Vegetable fatigue is a lack of enthusiasm for dealing with fresh vegetables. I completely understand. Going out to eat is the only remedy. A week or two to clear out the refrigerator helps.

Nevertheless, at the risk of wearing out our welcome, we offer a winter share. We finished planting our winter greenhouses on Friday morning. These are the greens that fill out the winter share. In total, we’ve planted four caterpillar tunnels and three high tunnels to a mix of choy, various kales and spinach – that’s twenty-three 140’ beds of greens. Every month, shares include a large bag of greens.

The winter share consists of three monthly deliveries that will include approximately 2 lb. of our organically grown greens (including spinach, a variety of kales and bok choy) and 8-10 lb. of our storage vegetables (including carrots, red and yellow onions, winter squash, a variety of potatoes, beets, leeks, sweet potatoes, shallots, and more), along with 4-6 lb. of fruits, and either apple cider, Deb’s homemade jelly made from her organic berries or local honey – all packed to fit in a returnable box – for $174.00

This year, we will only be offering three monthly deliveries instead of four. We have fewer crops going into storage and our farm team would like some time off.

We are minimizing our use of PLASTIC BAGS! We’ll pack loose where we can and use paper bags where we need packaging. Our GOAL will be to use zero plastic bags, but, because we want your salad greens to arrive fresh and we don’t have an alternative to plastic, we may use one plastic bag per month.

OPTIONAL shares include the EGG SHARE and MAPLE SHARE from Davis Family Farm and a GRAIN SHARE from Hickory Wind Farm (please see the details below).

Our deliveries are timed to coincide with the deliveries made to your CSA pickup site by Lewis-Waite Farm.

If you would like to register for a winter share, please sign up here:  Windflower Farm’s 2022-2023 Winter Share (wufoo.com). If you have already registered, thank you for joining us!

Have a great week, Ted