The News from Windflower Farm
Hello from Windflower Farm!
What’s in your share?
- Assorted tomatoes
- Rose Gold potatoes
- Leeks
- Onions
- Garlic
- Carrots
- Red leaf lettuce
- Kale
- Choy
- Acorn squash
You might try a potato-leek soup with the contents of this week’s share. Next week, we’ll likely send a share that looks like this one. Winter squashes are starting. This week, you’ll get an acorn squash. Next week, you’ll either get another or you’ll get a butternut. We intend to send our winter squashes as soon as we can. A consequence of the wet farm season is that they will not last long. Nor will they be especially abundant. And soon, we’ll start sending sweet potatoes. A batch is curing in our greenhouse now. Tomatoes and peppers and zucchinis are all in decline. It is time now for the crops of fall – cool weather greens and hardy roots, bulbs and tubers. Next week, you’ll get Romaine lettuce and koji and more kale along with potatoes, leeks, squashes, onions and carrots.
Your fruit share this week and probably next will consist of Yonder Farm’s ‘Blonde Gala’ and ‘Ruby Macintosh’ apples.
What’s new on the farm?
The Medinas have been harvesting sweet potatoes this morning. It’s a laborious project: first the vines are clipped back, then the mulch is loosened and removed, and finally the root clusters are plucked out of the earth. So far, each 300’ bed has yielded about 20 bushels. They will be in your shares soon, but not until they have been cured for about ten days in our 80-degree greenhouse. Curing is required to convert the starches in the sweet potato roots into sugars, and it makes all the difference in the world. Our first batch is due to come out of the greenhouse next week.
I’ve just come in from the packing shed where a group of us have been bagging tomatoes. As expected by mid-September, all of the varieties have slowed down, and some, including the heirlooms, have stopped producing altogether. It’s a cool and cloudy morning, and a gentle rain is falling, but a mouthful of red grape tomatoes makes me cheerful. ‘Red Pearl’, ‘Favorita’, and ‘Super Nova’, the three red grapes that we grow, are still quite flavorful. Sarah, who is from Queens and who has worked with us for a short while during each of the last four seasons, says that this corner of the packing shed looks a little like a candy shop, and that bagging tomatoes feels like putting gift bags together. Surrounded by ripe red fruit, much of it with the appearance and taste of candy, the conversation among the packers turned, perhaps inevitably, to love and the language of love. Jan described our own circuitous story, our love map, she calls it, and how this past July we celebrated 30 years together. And Sarah shared with us tidbits of her own love story. The young, single guys made themselves scarce during the conversation, and soon afterwards I, too, found other work in need of my attention. And so go our days in the packing shed.
This week we’ll be busy spreading compost and preparing fields. The heavy rainfall of last week prevented us from doing much of our field work. Very soon we’ll be planting greenhouse greens for the winter share and field garlic and onions for next year. Don, our driver, is having surgery this week. So, this week, and probably for the remainder of the CSA season, I will be driving the delivery truck. Please say hello.
Have a great week, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 