The News from Windflower Farm
What you’ll get this week
- Tomatoes
- Sweet corn
- Red and yellow sweet peppers
- Yellow onions
- Cilantro
- Lettuce
- Bunched red beets
- Beans – yellow wax or green
- Chiles (jalapeno and/or hungarian hot wax)
The beans will benefit from cooking. And probably from some kind of seasoning. I don’t know why they are so tough. These are popular varieties because they are usually tender and flavorful. Is it the result of the alternating hot and cold and wet and dry conditions that have prevailed this summer? Or is it because nutrients have been washed out of the soil by the excessive rainfall? I don’t know.
Here is my doom and gloom paragraph – feel free to skip ahead. A wet week is in the offing, and that is not good news for our onions, which we are in the process of pulling and field curing, or for our potato harvest, which we’d like to start but cannot because of the wet. Much of the lettuce that has not bolted has melted in the dampness. We’ll have a gap next week. The chard has Cercospora, the kale is buggy, and our winter squash is still weedy and waterlogged. It’s been a tough year!
Not all is doom and gloom. The young lettuce appears to love this rain. As do the sweet corn, beets, peppers, eggplant, carrots, sweet potatoes, and the new kale and chard plantings. And, because we grow tomatoes under protective covers, they are happy, too!
Your fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s blueberries. Peaches will be coming next week. These have been procured for us by Pete at Yonder Farm, but they will come from the Pennsylvania farm of a friend of his.
News from the farm
Nate helped me pull the sprayer out of the barn on Friday. You’ve probably seen the kind of thing I’m talking about: it consists of a large white tank and a 21’ wide boom and sits on the rear of a tractor. Ours covers three beds. Flea beetle populations in our fall broccoli and cabbage had become out of control. Insecticides are, of course, off limits to organic farmers. No Chlorpyrifos here. No Diazinon or Malathion. But we do spray sometimes, and when we do, it may well be some unusual stuff.
Rain came in multiple waves on Friday, so we woke early on Saturday to spray. It took an hour to prepare the sprayer – it was our first time out this season. We had to install the PTO roller pump, clean and install the spray nozzles, and then test the thing. We mixed a brew consisting of three ingredients: one was a fermented soil dwelling bacterium called Spinosad, another was an extraction from the root of chrysanthemum called Pyganic, and the last was mineral oil. A full 60-gallon tank can cover just an acre of crops, but that is all there was to spray. And thank goodness – the stuff was expensive. A quart of Entrust (the Spinosad product) costs over $600.
I worry that many of us fall prey to snake oil salesmen. I’m often surprised by what I’m told people add to their fields to achieve a little magic. Few of the products marketed to organic farmers have undergone efficacy trialing. In our need to control pests we are hopeful that we can purchase a remedy at the store, but we might also be too gullible or desperate. Twenty four hours later, I could see that the concoction we applied was effective. I didn’t see more than a handful of flea beetles in the entire field. The day before there were nearly that many on each plant. Thank goodness for a little snake oil!
Have a great week, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 