The News from Windflower Farm
What you’ll get this week
- Yellow wax beans
- Assorted potatoes
- Rosemary
- Garlic (the Denison’s “seconds”)
- ‘Bolero’ Carrots
- ‘Boro’ Beets
- Green cabbage
- Salad mix (mixed mustard greens)
- Winterbor kale
- ‘Magenta’ lettuce
Your fruit share, the last of the season, will be Yonder Farm’s ‘Empire’ apples.
When I mentioned to my friend and fellow farmer Brian Denison that we had a garlic crop failure, he offered to give us some of his “seconds” garlic at a good price. I couldn’t pass it up. It will be in this week’s share and in next week’s. I couldn’t imagine a CSA season without garlic.
You’ll find an online Windflower Farm CSA survey attached to this newsletter. Please help us to be the best CSA we can be by taking five or ten minutes to fill it out. 2023 CSA SURVEY (wufoo.com)
News from the farm
It’s been a busy week here at the farm. Although the weather has been pleasant for October, with no hard freeze in sight, the place still has a mad dash feel. The winter greens have all been planted, hooped, and covered. So too for the overwintering onion plants. But numerous beds of leeks, beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, cabbages, beans, and greens remain to be harvested. We still have a half-acre or so of onion sets and garlic cloves to plant and to mulch. We have perhaps five more acres to sow to cover crops. And we have over a dozen small greenhouses to clean up and ready for winter.
It is inevitable that cold weather will come, hence much of the urgency. But there is also the fact that our staff will be heading out of town soon. I will be purchasing airplane tickets for four members of the Medina household this afternoon. Candelaria, Daniel, Martin, and Miriam all plan to spend the winter in Guanajuato, Mexico. One day I’ll surprise them by purchasing a fifth ticket and tagging along, but not this time. Nate and I are excited about some projects we have planned for our workshop. And we bought ski passes at Bromley, the local mountain where farmers from throughout southern New England go to ski and to trade tips about new vegetable varieties, pest controls or staffing. It’s tempting to write the pass off as a business expense.
Next week’s vegetable delivery will be your last of the regular season. This one is the last for odd-week members. I’m not entirely sure what we’ll send next week, but it will likely include herbs, leeks, fennel, sweet potatoes, beets, and red onions, along with some escarole, braising greens, and kale. Oh, and more of Brian’s “seconds” garlic. Thanks very much for being with us.
I was at a memorial service at the rural cemetery down the hill from our house. Everyone from the community was there. I talked with a neighboring vegetable farmer about the farm season. “It’s been a rough year,” he said, and then showed me the scar he received from a run in with a piece of farm machinery. He then proceeded to tell me that he was going to quit farming. It wasn’t any one thing, he said, mentioning the labor challenge, the rains, the low pay, his back. His heart just wasn’t in it anymore. What will you do, I asked. He wasn’t sure, but he knew he was going to have a very large garden. And I reminded him that he had 2000 onion bulbs up at my place ready to plant.
Winter share news
We hope you’ll join us for the winter share. More information and a signup page can be found by following this link: Windflower Farm’s 2023-2024 Winter Share (wufoo.com). In short, our winter share consists of three deliveries of organic greens, vegetables, and fruits made between late November and early January. We finished transplanting the greens that will go into the winter share last week, including 12 beds in six ‘caterpillar’ tunnels and 15 beds in three high tunnels, to three types of lettuce, plus tatsoi, bok choy, two kale varieties and spinach. The storage vegetables in the winter share will come from our farm (potatoes, beets, sweet potatoes, cabbages, red and yellow onions, shallots, and leeks) and our friends at Denison farm (butternut squash, carrots, and celeriac). The fruits (apples primarily, and pears if I can find any) will come from Yonder Farm and the Bordens. Each month, we’ll include a sweet treat of some kind, including fresh, sweet apple cider, local honey, and local jam. Optional shares of eggs, maple products and grains are available, too. Consider joining us.
Take care, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 