The News from Windflower Farm
Happy Labor Day from the Windflower Farm team!
What’s in your share?
- Crisp or oakleaf lettuce
- Butterhead lettuce or radicchio
- Red and yellow onions
- Yellow potatoes
- Cabbage
- Tomatoes
- Garlic
- Sweet peppers
- Green beans or yellow wax beans from Markristo Farm
This week’s peaches will likely be Pete’s last of the season. I’ve been pleased with them, and I hope you have been, too. It cannot be easy to grow peaches in the relatively cold climate of the Hudson Valley. He thinks it may have been his best crop ever. Bartlett pears and late summer plums will be in fruit shares during the next two weeks, and then on to apples and cider.
Next week’s vegetable box should include, among other items: sweet corn, tomatoes, eggplants, garlic, kale and beets.
What’s new on the farm?
Highways heading into the city from the north were closed on Thursday morning after Hurricane Ida passed through, and Don and Daniel had to find a new route on the fly, taking them first into New Jersey and then across lower Manhattan. I was very pleased that they were able to get to all but one site given the difficulties they encountered along the way. But Don’s been behind the wheel for us for nearly ten years (it will be 440 deliveries at the end of the year) and he knows what he’s doing! I hope that you managed to get to the site yourself given the challenges presented by the storm.
The shorter days and cooler weather of September mark our transition to the vegetable crops of fall. Potato, cabbage, onion and beet harvests have begun to fill our barn’s storage bays. Soon we’ll be bringing in hard squashes, sweet potatoes and carrots. Row covers have been put back on salad crops in the field as temperatures have dropped. There should still be plenty of warm weather ahead, and tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and squashes, our summer lineup, will, I think, continue to produce well, but I already sense a change.
Our little farm continues to be a busy place. We’ll be seeding greens for winter shares this week, which should allow us to transplant them into our unheated greenhouses on time in early October. And we are preparing land now for cover crops and for planting onions and strawberries that will overwinter under floating row covers. Nevertheless, the days feel easier somehow, perhaps because of cooler working temperatures or the reduced daylight hours available for working. Perhaps because we’re in farm shape, having trimmed down after four months of field work. Or perhaps because there are fewer decisions to make, having dispensed with most of the many hundreds of small but tiring decisions that must be made in the course of the farm season.
I hope that you, too, find your work easing, at least on this one day of the year during which we celebrate and take a break from our labors.
Have a great week, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 