CSA News from Windflower Farm
Delivery #2, Week of June 11, 2018
This week’s share contents.
Your second share of the season will be arriving tomorrow. You’ll get arugula and a salad mix, along with baby spinach and lettuce. This might be greens enough for salads all week long! You’ll also get kohlrabi, radishes, scallions and cooking greens or Happy Rich. And you’ll get your choice of potted purple and Genovese basil or Thai basil and cilantro. Our own organic strawberries will fill out your fruit share. Flowers started for everyone last week and it’s Jan’s hope that she can deliver flowers every week for the next nine weeks. Next week, you can expect more salad crops. Sweet Japanese turnips, cucumbers and zucchinis are getting started and, depending on the weather, one or more should be in next week’s share.
What’s new on the farm.
It’s Sunday. Nate is painting a piece of farm equipment he has built, Jan is working in her flower garden and the Medinas are harvesting strawberries.
I’ve just come in from planting green beans with the John Deere and Multiflex seeder I purchased last year. It’s become dry and my tractor kicked up a cloud of dust as it pulled the seeder along. I sprinkled black bacterial spores on the white bean seeds. Once the spores awaken from their slumber, they’ll colonize the bean roots and provide them with nitrogen they have “fixed” from the air. I’ll irrigate these tomorrow as part of a block that includes a new carrot seeding. Three 350’ beds of beans, each bed with two rows, or just over 2000 row-feet. I will repeat this every ten days or so through early August. It is part of a regular seeding I’ll do that includes radishes and greens.
On my way back to the barn, I peeked under the row cover where arugula, a salad mix and radishes have been growing for the past 30 days or so. All three of these will be in your shares this week. We’ll pull them root and all and then bunch and wash them. Bunched, we’ll be able to send them without a plastic bag. For your part, all you’ll have to do is cut them midway up the stem, rinse, dry, and serve.
The locusts finished blooming here a week ago. They grow in groves and produce a powerfully sweet fragrance. The wood is famous for long lived fences, but they are also valuable to farmers as an indicator plant: old timers will tell you that it’s safe to plant your garden once the locusts have bloomed. Last week, believing the threat of frost to be behind us, we planted sweet potato slips, the last of our field peppers, chiles and eggplants and uncovered our cucumbers and squashes.
Have a great week, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 