The News from Windflower Farm
What you’ll get this week
- Green beans
- Lettuce
- Spinach
- Summer squash
- Tomatoes
- Sweet peppers
- Butternut squash
- Chiles
Your fruit share will be a mix of Yonder Farms’ ‘Zeststar’ and ‘Golden Supreme’ apples.
News from the farm
We harvested just four 20-bushel totes of winter squash. There are perhaps two more in the field. If we include pie pumpkins, this harvest might provide shares for two weeks. Disappointing. Last year, we harvested 320 bushels from a similar sized planting. The side-by-side fields we chose had low spots at their centers, and the rainy summer resulted in standing water that never subsided. We’ll send them all right away. And then, in this upside-down season, we’ll resume sending summer squash. Janthinks the winter squash might best be used as additions to things: added to chili or to tacos, for example, or included in a medley of root vegetables. She says to use them right away – they won’t keep. I think you may also need to be liberal with brown sugar.
In better news, we began harvesting sweet potatoes on Thursday and they look good. They’re pretty, good-sized, and richly colored. We’ll begin the curing process rightaway – eighty degrees and 100 percent humidity for ten days – which helps their starches turn into sugars. The Ag & Markets food safety team came to inspect our farm last Thursday, and we spent most of our time talking about how to grow good sweet potatoes in the Northeast. We passed the inspection with an ‘A’, by the way. Kristoffer made the observation that if they had witnessed shortcomings related to our food handling protocols, we wouldn’t have talked much about sweet potatoes.
You would not guess how my new delivery truck got its first dent. There are so many ways a truck might get a dent in the city, but this one was unexpected. Don and Daniel were driving along Bergen Street in Brooklyn, moving slowly because of someone on a bicycle ahead of them. This made the driver of the car behind them furious. He honkedhis horn, he waved his hands, gesticulating exactly how you might imagine. And then, at the light at the end of the block, he charged out of his car and pounded his fist on the door of the truck. He was a big man and it scared the hell out of Don and Daniel. And it left a fist-sized dent in the middle of the driver’s side door. Oh, brother!
It seems to have happened quickly – we are in the season’s final quarter. Summer vegetables are winding down. Soon, our eggplants, peppers and tomatoes will give out. We have already begun to rip out some of the underperformers. At the first sign of cold, our summer squash will also be done. The same for beans and corn. But greens and the roots, bulbs and tubers of fall are still ahead. Next week, we’ll send lettuce, kale, potatoes, Rosemary, carrots, onions, and squashes of some sort.
Have a great week!
Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 