The News from Windflower Farm
Hello from Windflower Farm!
What’s in your share?
- Green Bibb lettuce
- Purple ruffled kale
- Purple beets
- French Breakfast radishes
- Tomatoes
- Garlic
- Peppers
- Eggplant
- Red and yellow onions
- Zucchini
This week’s fruit will be prunes from Yonder Farm. Prunes are very like plums, differing from them most noticeably by their shape – plums are round, prunes are oblong. In markets, prunes will often be identified as plums, which bothers Pete. He suspects that this is the case because prune juice has an association with a home remedy for people who are irregular. I have my own childhood memories of my mom chasing me around with a little brown bottle of prune juice if she thought I’d become bound up! Which is unfortunate, Pete says, because prunes are absolutely delicious and they should be called by their proper name!
What’s new on the farm?
I bought a four-bottom International plow last week. Fresh points, coulters and tires, and new red paint to make it shine. I was putty in the salesman’s hands. Still, it was the result of a little horse trading. Our neighbor Matt became aware that I’d broken a plow in the spring of last year and I’d left it in a hedgerow. In the business of spring, I’d replaced it with one I’d purchased from a local dealer that turned out to be too big. They have five bottoms, my old plows had four, and my old John Deere struggled to pull them. So, yes, I now have two plows. But I plan to sell one set. The salesman told me that 4-bottom plows are in more demand than those with five bottoms, so I’ll have to do the work of cutting them down to size. In the meantime, Matt purchased my old plows, giving me the opportunity to put a down payment on a set that was a better fit.
To save money on delivery, I decided to drive my tractor into town to pick up the plows myself. I’d not taken my tractor on a road trip before. The dealership is about ten miles from our farm, on the edge of the village of Greenwich, near a traffic circle. My tractor and plows were not a small presence on the highway, and therefore hard to get around. Moreover, the rig topped out at just under 22 miles per hour. In short order a line of several cars were behind me. I would pull over where I could, but opportunities for doing so did not come along very often. At one point, some twenty cars were behind me. It was then that a large combine was coming toward me from the opposite direction. He gave me a friendly wave as we passed, and very possibly a thumbs up. I counted close to thirty cars behind him! All of which brought to mind a Craig Morgan song Daren and Kristoffer had talked about a few days earlier called “International Harvester.” It’s about “a third generation farmer, a combine driver, hoggin’ up the road with his pupapupa plower, chugging along the road at 5 miles an hour…” The music video depicts very unhappy drivers in a mile-long traffic jam behind Craig’s tractor. In my own experience, drivers were nothing but considerate. I like to think that they were as pleased with my new plows as I was.
Have a great week, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 