The News from Windflower Farm
What you’ll get this week
- ‘Nancy’ green butterhead lettuce
- ‘Rouxai’ red oakleaf lettuce
- Arugula
- ‘French Breakfast’ radishes
- Yellow onions
- Kale
- Cucumbers (lots!)
- Zucchini or summer squash (lots!)
The fruit share will again be Yonder Farm’s strawberries. I had hoped for cherries, but the three inches of rain that fell in the Hudson Valley last week caused them to split. Blueberries will be ripening soon, and Iexpect to send them next week.
News from the farm
We missed a cultivation in the first and second successions of sweet corn because of the rain and mud, so Nate and I hoed it by hand today. Each row is 400’ long, which felt too long in the day’s heat. Placing waterjugs at each end of the planting would have made better sense than what I did, which was to leave one jug back at the beginning of the row. We used stirrup hoes, which are comprised of thin blades that slice through weeds just below the soil surface and look, as you can imagine, just like stirrups. Our soil is stoney, and the openness of the stirrup allows stones to pass through, minimizing our effort. The blades are mounted on a bracket that allows them to oscillate. Back and forth, push then pull. I walk backwards down the row, which uses lower back muscles and biceps primarily, pulling the blade through the weeds, then pushing back through the soil and pulling again, making for three passes and an effective weed kill. When I get tired, I turn around and push the hoe, using triceps and stomach muscles. It’s an excellent core workout. There are 16 rows in these two successions, which is why we try to time our tractor cultivations to avoid this kind of work.
From the high ground where we were hoeing corn, we could see three young guys windrowing red onions. Two of the guys will be high school seniors in the fall and, when they are here, work almost exclusively in the packing shed. Their daylong stint in the field gave them a very different sense of work on the farm. Hot, sometimes buggy, sometimes back-breaking, often dirty work. Some of us love that stuff, others can’t get out of the field soon enough. The ‘Desert Sunrise’ onion variety that we planted last fall have sized up and their tops have gone down, signaling that it is time to harvest. The first step in the process is to pull them out of the earth, shake the soil out of their roots, and then to lay them in rows to dry. We are pleased with their size and color. We’ll snip tops and roots and bring them into the greenhouse before the next rain. These are not keepers, so they’ll be in shares soon.
We could also see Salvador and Candelaria and their boys in the field below the onions. They were taking covers off the peppers, eggplants, chiles and melons. This is the diminishing handful of crops we grow on black plastic mulch and under low wire hoops and fabric row covers. After a cold, windy and dry start to their lives in the field, we are happy to see how healthy the plants look. Salvador decided to abandon planting corn today. While it is hot and sunny, we have had quite a bit of rain in recent days, and the side hill where they were going to plant is too muddy. From there, they will be off to a planting of storage onions. We’ve never been able to escape at least some hand weeding in bare ground onions, and in this wet stretch, the weeds have outpaced our best effort. This is a tradeoff for us. If our onions were on black plastic mulch, we wouldn’t have this weeding chore, but we’d have plastic to throw away.
That’s all for now. Have a great week, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 