It’s a Week A Pick-Up This Thursday, August 31st!
We still really need extra plastic bags,
please bring any extras you have to pick up this Thursday!
This week’s share:
-Yellow wax beans
-Yellow-fleshed potatoes
-Sweet peppers
-Yellow onions
-Your choice of Choy or Koji
-Sweet corn
-Tomatoes
-Basil (or chiles and cilantro, depending on your site)
-Salanova lettuce
-Your choice of Cabbage, Beet, or Eggplant.
-Your fruit will be peaches from Yonder farm and our organic cantaloupes or watermelons.
CSA News from Windflower Farm
Delivery #13, August 29 and 31, 2017
The Washington County Fair took place last week, and Jan, Nate and I snuck away on Wednesday afternoon for the draft animal show. When Jan was a child, she would ride on the backs of Ned and Nell, the large Belgian team they used to pull the maple sugaring wagon from sap bucket to sap bucket through the sugar bush, and she loves to watch the large animals work. Nate and I think we’d like a team, so we went to visit with some of the local teamsters. There were only two teams at the fair – a pair of Percherons and another of Halflingers – because horse farming has all but disappeared from the county. As their name suggests, Halflingers, at 14 hands, are smaller than other draft breeds, which makes them the better choice for a starter team. We think we might use horses to cultivate potatoes and pathways between mulched crops and to pull wagons. If we were to get a team, it would be for the simple joy of working with animals, and not to replace our tractors.We suspended our animal-based diet for maple milkshakes, BBQ and fried dough, and walked through the farm implement exhibits and animal pavilions – poultry, pigs, and countless cows. This is dairy country, and prized stock from every farm is on display: big eyed black and white spotted Holsteins, brown and white spotted Brown Swiss, and brown Jerseys, the kind Jan grew up with. The beef cattle breeds – Angus and Hereford – were on display, too. I was reminded of the farm my mom and her four sisters grew up on in a place called Buffalo Prairie, along the Mississippi, where they raised black Angus cattle and hogs.
By Wednesday, most of the cut flowers and vegetables in the 4-H judging barn were looking pretty sad, but I found the produce of young Shelly McBride, age 11, including her blue ribbon-winning red cabbage, the largest I’d ever seen, to be beautiful and a little intimidating. She’d be quite a competitor if she decides to go into commercial vegetable farming. One can hope she’ll go straight into the slaw business.
Nate is interested in a small wool flock – perhaps Icelandic sheep or Angora or Cashmere goats – and we headed off to the wool barn. The rolling Washington County landscape is well suited to the pasture and hay crops that are central to raising livestock. Because we are not (ordinarily) meat eaters, we are limited in the ways we might become involved in livestock farming. We don’t know if a wool flock (that is, one that excludes meat) is economically viable, so, if we start, we’ll start small. The county fair is the place where agricultural entrepreneurs go to dream.
Have a great week, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 