The News from Windflower Farm
What’s in your share?
- Arugula
- Green leaf lettuce
- Salad mix (mustard greens)
- Broccoli
- Sweet potatoes
- Leeks
- Red onions
- Fennel
- Garlic
- Butternut squash
- French Breakfast radishes
Your fruit share will be Empire apples and Bosc pears from Yonder Farm. This is the last fruit delivery for our half fruit share members who pick up on even weeks. Half fruit share members who pick up on odd weeks and full fruit share members will have one more week of fruit shares. Pete, at Yonder Farm, our primary fruit supplier, and I miscommunicated a few weeks ago (week 17). As a result, he did not have a fruit share ready for our truck when we stopped at his farm on our way to the city that Thursday. My apologies. Your last fruit share will take place on Thursday of week 21.
We roasted our first sweet potatoes this weekend. We put a couple of pounds in the oven at 400 degrees and it took about an hour for the caramelized juices to start oozing out, indicating that they were ready to serve. Unlike winter squashes, which often require sweetening despite our best intentions in the field, a fully cured and completely baked potato is always sweet eating, at least in my experience. We were not disappointed. More will come your way in this week’s share. The Delicatas and acorn squashes are now mostly gone from our root cellar. Butternuts, the buff colored, creamy textured, slightly hourglass shaped squashes, are up next. Both butternuts and sweet potatoes make excellent and creamy soups. We did not have enough time to harvest and process ginger this week, so it will not be a part of shares until next week and the week after. Potatoes, garlic and leeks (sounds like another soup!) will also make up part of the last two shares.
Our primary greenhouse is empty once again. We finished planting the overwintering onions on Thursday and the winter greens on Friday. Over the weekend, we began to plant onion sets and garlic. It’s not a fast process – the sets are placed in the ground by hand one plant at a time, each set producing just one onion or garlic bulb – but the work will soon be done. Until today, the weather had been perfect for these tasks. A light, cold rain is falling this morning, and no one wants to work outside. The packing shed is crowded with people doing the produce sorting and counting for our Tuesday delivery. The sugar maples across the road are losing their leaves, and signs of November are beginning to peek through.
Winter share news
It’s winter share signup season! A few years back, my friends at the Stanton Street CSA in the Lower East Side introduced me to the idea of “vegetable fatigue,” which they say can occur any time beginning around week 18 or 20 in the CSA season. Vegetable fatigue is a lack of enthusiasm for dealing with fresh vegetables. I completely understand. Going out to eat is the only remedy. A week or two to clear out the refrigerator helps.
Nevertheless, at the risk of wearing out our welcome, we offer a winter share. We finished planting our winter greenhouses on Friday morning. These are the greens that fill out the winter share. In total, we’ve planted four caterpillar tunnels and three high tunnels to a mix of choy, various kales and spinach – that’s twenty-three 140’ beds of greens. Every month, shares include a large bag of greens.
The winter share consists of three monthly deliveries that will include approximately 2 lb. of our organically grown greens (including spinach, a variety of kales and bok choy) and 8-10 lb. of our storage vegetables (including carrots, red and yellow onions, winter squash, a variety of potatoes, beets, leeks, sweet potatoes, shallots, popcorn and more), along with 4-6 lb. of fruits, and either apple cider, Deb’s homemade jelly made from her organic berries or local honey – all packed to fit in a returnable box – for $174.00
This year, we will only be offering three monthly deliveries instead of four. We have fewer crops going into storage and our farm team would like some time off.
We are minimizing our use of PLASTIC BAGS! We’ll pack loose where we can and use paper bags where we need packaging. Our GOAL will be to use zero plastic bags, but, because we want your salad greens to arrive fresh and we don’t have an alternative to plastic, we may use one plastic bag per month.
OPTIONAL shares include the EGG SHARE and MAPLE SHARE from Davis Family Farm and a GRAIN SHARE from Hickory Wind Farm (please see the details below).
Our deliveries are timed to coincide with the deliveries made to your CSA pickup site by Lewis-Waite Farm.
If you would like to sign up for the winter share, please register here: Windflower Farm’s 2022-2023 Winter Share (wufoo.com)
Have a great week, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 