CSA News from Windflower Farm
Delivery #8, Week of July 23, 2018
This week’s share. Your choice of a green – ‘Red Russian’ kale or Swiss chard – along with ‘French Breakfast’ radishes, tomatoes, basil, peppers, green onions, cucumbers, summer squashes and either broccoli or cabbage. Salad greens are missing from this list. For some of you, a break from greens might be welcome, for others, not so much. My apologies. The toll of the drought and hot weather will be most keenly felt by the absence of greens for the next two weeks. We received a farm-saving rain mid-week last week. If before the rain our pond had the appearance of a mud flat at low tide (see our Instagram page), after the rain it appears as though the tide has risen about two feet, enough to get the irrigation equipment running again, but not enough to be out of the woods. The heat and lack of rainfall caused the loss of thousands of heads of lettuce and choy and other leafy greens – in some cases to premature bolting, in others to our inability to provide water in the week after transplanting. And in one case, to the drought tolerant weeds that got to them before our cultivators. The good news is that we’ll be back in leafy greens in relatively short order. In the meantime, summer produce is coming in – including tomatoes and basil, sweet peppers and, very soon, sweet corn. Your fruit share will consist of cherries – perhaps the last of the season – followed soon by peaches and blueberries.
Projects. Last week, we harvested the last of the garlic, this week, we’ll finish harvesting the early onions. Size is down somewhat, but bulb quality is good. Two of three potato fields are weed-free, and this week, we’ll clean up the third. We’ll also give the leeks, beans, beets and broccoli a good weeding. Then, we’ll irrigate the whole of it, along with the sweet potatoes and winter squashes we weeded last week. Among our other projects, Andrea will spray a biological bug killer on the broccoli, collards, kale and rutabagas this week. Our foe is the tiny flea beetle, and it’s chewing holes in the leaves of these Brassicas. Nate will cultivate the sweet corn and youngest lettuces with the Dutch hoes on his electric cultivator. TB, a young carpenter who works with us from time to time, will build workshop cabinets – eight of them – with the help of Julia, our new field coordinator. And I will finish the job of busting through the hedgerow so that the well drillers can get started.
Have a great week, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 