Hi Everyone,
News from Ted at Windflower Farm below.
SAVE THE DATE for this year’s farm weekend, August 27-28 in beautiful Upstate New York. All CBCSA members are invited to Windflower Farm for tours, camping and joviality with friends from the CSA. More details to come later this summer.
Lastly, a friendly reminder to half share members with full share eggs and/or flowers to stop by every week for their additional products.
See you tomorrow!
Best,
CBCSA Core Group
News from Windflower Farm
3rd Distribution, Week of June 20, 2016
What a difference a week makes! Hello from a hot and dry Windflower Farm!
This week’s share:
Red Leaf Lettuce
Green Romaine or Oakleaf Lettuce
Garlic Scapes
Your choice of two between Swiss Chard, Arugula and Choy
Scallions
Radishes
Bok Choy
Spinach
Potted Herbs
Strawberries and rhubarb will be in your fruit shares. We will begin sending fruit share refunds this week. Please be patient; because of the number of refunds and the ongoing work of farming, the process will take a couple of weeks.
Flower shares will be starting soon. Jan says that they are running behind because of the challenging spring weather.
We’ve been irrigating nonstop this past week. It hasn’t rained for two weeks and no rain is in sight, so we irrigate around the clock. We’ve invested quite a bit in irrigation equipment over the years, making it a lot easier to get water to our crops. We have two ponds and a deep, high volume well to draw from. And that is good news because rainfall this spring has been 8” below normal. We use drip irrigation on much of the farm, an Israeli technology that makes very efficient use of water, but we also use a good deal of overhead irrigation. We have invested in two irrigation reels over the years. These are sprinklers that travel the length of beds by themselves, irrigating whole swaths of crops a half-acre at a time. Nate and I share the workload: he irrigates the back fields from the ponds and I irrigate the front fields and greenhouses from the well. Yesterday he ran drip irrigation on a field of onions and garlic and then on another of cucumbers, melons and squashes. This morning he set up the reel on a field of beets, spinach and carrots. Now he’s irrigating a field of sweet corn. For my part, yesterday, I ran an irrigation reel through a field of mixed crops, including herbs, greens and popcorn, then ran drip on our pepper, cucumber and tomato greenhouses this morning, and I’m now running a reel through a field of lettuce and broccoli. It’s a tight schedule – it takes nearly a week to get through the whole farm. There is a slim chance of rain tonight, so we’ll continue to irrigate. Tomorrow it’s on to a flower field and then the cabbage…
Have a great week!
Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 