The News from Windflower Farm
This week’s share
- Probably your last tomatoes
- Sweet peppers
- Leeks
- Potatoes (or beets)
- Acorn squashes (or butternuts)
- Parsley
- Lettuce
- Bok Choy
- Kale
- Possibly other salad greens
Your fruit share will be apples from Yonder Farm and cider from Borden Farm. Next week, you’ll get carrots, arugula, red onions and sweet potatoes, among other goodies. More potatoes to come.
What’s new on the farm?
Fall colors are at their peak now, a week ahead of normal, perhaps because of the unusual heat and drought of summer or those early frosts – who really knows? – and they are stunning. We are living for this briefest of moments in a picture postcard. We know that these red and orange leaves will blow away in the next big wind, and that we’ll be in a monochromatic landscape for the next seven months – seven months! – but it’s all pretty terrific for now.
Winter greens planting is underway this week. Tomatoes are being yanked out and tossed in the compost pile, and winter hardy greens are being planted one by one into freshly composted, newly tilled and highly fragrant earth, in straight, nearly perfect rows (Salvador and Candelaria lead such a fantastic team!). Soon, we’ll place hoops and floating row covers over the greens. And soon after that we’ll begin lowering the sides on the greenhouses to keep the greens warm enough so that they continue growing, but not so warm as to prevent them from becoming hardened enough to withstand the cold of winter. These greenhouses are unheated, and a tender plant won’t survive.
Next week, we’ll begin planting next year’s garlic and covering next year’s strawberry plants to protect them against the extremes of winter. Squirrels are burying nuts and we, too, are making preparations for winter.
Have a great week, Ted