The News from Windflower Farm
It’s winter share signup season! The deadline to sign up is November 1st or until our CSA is full. Winter shares are selling out quickly, so please do not delay if you would like one. Please read below to learn more.
What’s in the share?
- Lettuce
- Swiss chard
- Carrots
- Caraflex cabbage, pointy variety
- Sweet potatoes
- Butternut squash
- Delicata or acorn squash (choice)
- Rosemary
- Broccoli
- Fennel
- Baby ginger
- Leeks
Baby ginger is spicy, juicy and does not need to be peeled. Put it in a plastic bag and refrigerate for up to a week or freeze. You can easily grate frozen ginger for soups and curries using a microplane.
Fruit shares ended two weeks ago. The fruit share was 20 weeks for full share members and 10 weeks for half share members. If you had a fruit share this year, we hope you enjoyed it.
What’s new on the farm?
We’ve just come in from harvesting Nate’s ginger. I call it Nate’s because he’s the one who introduced the crop to our farm and because he found Biker Dude, the Hawaiian source of our ‘mother’ ginger roots. My fingers are still cold – a cold wind blew throughout the day and temperatures failed to get out of the forties. Nate made changes to how he grew the crop this year: he planted it outdoors under low tunnels, a technique that worked especially well in this warm summer. In the Northeast, it’s usually grown in the greenhouse. And, because it was grown outdoors, we could harvest all of it with a carrot bed lifter mounted on our John Deere, allowing us to ditch the pitchforks, our usual harvest aids, and saving us a good deal of physical effort.
Salvador, Candelaria and Liz planted the last two beds of garlic today, including a handful of experimental varieties. The final task is to cover the acre and a half of fall Alliums with two layers of Covertan, a floating row cover that will mitigate winter’s temperature extremes. Daniel and his cousins Martin and Miriam are dismantling Caterpillar tunnels, the structures in which we grew your tomatoes, sweet peppers and early cucumbers. Plant debris goes into a compost pile that is growing ever larger, and plastic covers are put away until next spring. The heavy lifting is nearly done.
We harvested some additional odds and ends today for this final share of the season, including a pointed cabbage variety called ‘Caraflex.’ Because of a stroke of good luck in which a recent frost killed off the weeds that had inundated two of our fall beds, a pretty crop of frost-hardy Swiss chard reappeared and became a part of today’s harvest, too. And with this bit of serendipity, we are wrapping up the farm season. This week’s delivery is the final one of the 2024 summer season. Jan, Nate and I hope you’ve enjoyed your shares. Thank you very much for being with us. Please send me an email with any feedback or suggestions (tedblomgren@gmail.com). Thank you, too, to those of you who are core group organizers. We couldn’t do this without you. Finally, a big thanks to the Windflower Farm team, a thoughtful, hard-working and good-humored group of people that make it a delight to show up every day.
Best wishes,
Ted, Jan and Nate
Last chance for a winter share!
Purchasing a winter share is your chance to extend the fruit and vegetable season through the New Year.
What is it? In a nutshell, the winter share consists of a total of three one-bushel boxes, one delivered every fourth Saturday from mid-November through earlyJanuary (November 16th, December 14th, and January 11th). It contains a big bag of fresh greens (kale, spinach and more), 8-10 lb. of vegetables from our root cellar (including winter squashes, “Irish” and sweet potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, and other storage veggies), 4-6 lb. of delicious apples (and pears if available) from the Borden Farm, and a sweet treat every month (the Borden’s apple cider, Harry’s honey, and Deb’s jam). Optional grain, maple and egg shares are also available. Please follow the link for more details and to sign up.
Click here to learn more: Windflower Farm’s 2024-2025 Winter Share (wufoo.com). We hope you’ll join us for the winter share season!
Central Brooklyn CSA 