Hello Central Brooklyn CSA Members!
It’s a week A pick up this Thursday, June 22nd!
The Central Brooklyn CSA Stoop Parties are this week and next week. Come by to enjoy some snacks and meet your fellow Week A and Full Time members, next week’s will be Week B’s!
June 22 at Julie’s house:
1265 Dean St., directly across the street from our CSA pickup:
5:00PM to 8:00PM
June 29 at Callie and Randy’s house:
1251 Dean St., directly across the street from our CSA pickup:
5:00PM to 8:00PM
We’ll have drinks and snacks, and you are welcome to bring more to share or just stop by on your way in or out of pickup!
It’s our first Lewis Waite delivery this week! If you missed the order deadline don’t sweat, they’ll be back July 6th!
Please bring your own bags, or bring your excess plastic bags to donate to other share members. We’re almost out of the ones at the pick up site.
This week’s share: your choice of kale varieties, a bunch of broccoli, two heads of lettuce, squashes, scallions, Swiss chard, sweet Hakurei turnips and more potted herbs.
Please read this note from Ted to find out more about this week’s share!
CSA News from Windflower Farm
Delivery #3, June 20/22, 2017
Our farm season starts at the end of February, when we dust the snow off our greenhouses, test fire heaters and fans and water supplies, and sow our first onion and tomato seeds. We spend the first 60 days of the season in the greenhouse producing the tens of thousands of seedlings that will fill out our fields once the outdoor growing season gets underway in late April. It might be winter outside, but in the greenhouse it feels as though we’ve taken a trip to the deep south.
The next sixty days of the season – the last two months of spring – are always something of a marathon here at Windflower Farm. This is the part of the season when this vegetable farmer’s life is at its most hectic and stressful. Our target first planting day is April 21st, when any remaining snow is usually confined to north-facing hedgerows, and by June 21st, the start of summer, and longest day of the year, we hope to have the farm fully planted to all but the later successional crops and to have made several deliveries to the city.
Here is a short list of our accomplishments to-date: we have planted about two acres each of “Irish” potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions and other alliums, winter squashes, various greens, sweet corn and cut flowers. We have planted an acre or so each of green beans; root crops like beets, carrots and radishes; Brassicas (cabbages and broccoli); and Cucurbits (cukes, zukes and melons). And we’ve made several smaller plantings of arugula, celery, mustard mixes and herbs. We’ve planted two large greenhouses to tomatoes and a third to cut flowers. And we’ve planted 24 small greenhouses (150’ long structures we call “caterpillar tunnels”) to a combination of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, basil and cut flowers. In addition, we put in a new quarter acre of elderberries and a half acre of table grapes. It’s been a busy 60 days!
Those first 60 days in the field tell us much about how the season will go. And so I thought I’d share some slightly scattered observations and give you a sense of what to expect. Mother Nature, a full partner in the farm, gave us some challenges. It was an unusually cold and wet spring, as you know, which threw off our planting schedule and will delay some (but certainly not all) harvests. So, where are we?
I expect tomatoes, peppers, chiles and eggplants, in particular, to be a little later than usual, but our use of tunnels has been helpful and you should see these items showing up in early August shares. I’m grateful for the recent arrival of warm sunny weather. It is bringing on squashes and cucumbers a little earlier than expected. Squash starts this week, cucumbers should start the week after.
Greens, strawberries, alliums, cabbages and potatoes all like cool, wet springs, and they are happy, if slightly delayed. We are trying to avoid giving you too many greens, but we continue to send them because we want to fill out your shares. Green onions will be showing up fairly soon and will become a regular weekly feature. Sweet corn does not like cool temperatures, nor do beans, and they will be later. My fear is that my four corn plantings all comes in at once! Garlic scapes are coming next week, and garlic bulbs a month after that, right on schedule. Kohlrabi continues to mature, turnips start this week, beets are coming soon, and carrots will start in early August. Eating seasonally is always full of surprises.
This week’s share: your choice of kale varieties, a bunch of broccoli, two heads of lettuce, squashes, scallions, Swiss chard, sweet Hakurei turnips and more potted herbs.
Best wishes, Ted and Jan
Central Brooklyn CSA 