The News from Windflower Farm
Hello from a hot Windflower Farm!
What’s in your share?
- Fennel bulbs and fronds
- Scallions
- Eggplant
- Zucchinis or summer squashes
- Green Boston lettuce
- Kale or collards
- Onion bulbs
- Broccoli, broccolini or beets
Your fruit share will be blueberries from Yonder Farm. Peaches, plums and apricots are coming soon.
Peppers have also been coming along quickly and may be a part of next week’s share. Beans are likely, too.
Our eggplant harvest came as a bit of a surprise for us this week – the hot weather and drip irrigation have helped to bring it along sooner than expected. If you are relatively new to eggplant, you might try it on your pizza: slice it, dip it in a light batter, and fry it on the stove top. Put the fried eggplant slices on top of your favorite pizza and add dollops of pesto and ricotta. Baba ganoush, ratatouille and Thai spicy eggplant with basil are other excellent options.
Fennel bulbs and fronds are also in your shares. Curried roasted fennel, summer slaw and shaved fennel salad are great ways to enjoy this vegetable.
All of these recipes and many more can be found at the Stanton Street CSA website (https://stantonstreetcsa.wordpress.com) under “Veggie tips & recipes.” We also like contentednesscooking.com for recipe ideas.
We experimented with packing everything into one bag at a few sites last week, and the results were not what we wanted. This week, your shares will come in three packages: two smaller plastic bags – one containing greens and the other the more durable vegetables – and a paper bag full of tomatoes. And they will be shipped to sites in separate totes. Remember, there will be no box (except locally and at the park site in Washington Hts.), so you’ll need something in which to carry these items home.
What’s new on the farm?
Our organic certification inspector is coming on Tuesday. Farm inspections are an annual event, but this is our first with this organization. We’ve been busy getting our paperwork in order, putting soil tests in a file, cleaning up our workshop, tidying up our barns and seed cupboard, tackling weed messes and generally trying to make ourselves appear respectable.
The inspector, a woman from the western Catskills, will come with two activities in mind. In the “mass balance audit” she’ll take a look at all of our purchases (seeds, plastics, etc.), field applications (compost, lime), field plantings and harvest records and ask if this is enough to support our sales volume or what we have noted on our CSA distribution lists. In the “trace-back audit” she’ll select an item from the distribution record and follow it back through time from distribution to harvest and planting, looking at field maps, seeding records and the purchase of associated inputs. It could be a long day.
Wish us luck, and have a great week!
Cheers, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 