The News from Windflower Farm
Happy Juneteenth! Our sites will be open for regular distribution on Thursday, June 19th. If you are not able to pick up your share due to the holiday, you’re welcome to ask a friend, family member, or neighbor to pick up for you. Please ask them to provide your name when they pick up your share.
What’s in the vegetable share?
- Butterhead lettuce
- Purple kohlrabi
- Crunchy King radishes
- Red Russian kale
- Mixed adolescent mustard greens
- Garlic scapes
- Bunched baby onions
- Happy Rich broccolini
The fruit share is a quart of Yonder Farm’s strawberries.
The first distribution of maple and grain shares is this week. If you ordered one, please pick them up at your site.
News from the farm
The arrival late last week of sunshine and warm weather and the forecast of more to come has been welcomed by all of us on the farm. Happy Rich responded by shooting up its Raab-like florets, and summer squashes and cucumbers have begun to put on size. It is likely you’ll get one of these vegetables in your share this week, with more to come soon.
We rarely spray, and never with anything not approved by the National Organic Standards Board. But wet (or humid) and cloudy conditions usually enable diseases to gain a foothold, which appears to have been the case in our high tunnel cucumbers, and I have pulled out my backpack sprayer. We love the promise of greenhouse cucumbers, but so far our lived experience has come up short. Our crop currently has a disease called Angular Leaf Spot, which is caused by a bacterium that can survive on seeds, including those purchased from reputable seed companies. Because our county extension agent is a friend, Andrea and I reached out to him for a confirmation of our diagnosis and management advice. At this point, he told us, our only recourse as organic growers is to remove infested older leaves and to spray elemental copper every week. And so, I sprayed. And I might spray again this week. The chief danger is to the guy operating the sprayer: copper is not something you want to get on your skin or in your eyes. Copper might exist as a surface residue on the cucumber fruit at harvest; it does not penetrate the skin. We will wash your cukes at the farm and you should wash them again at home. If you are concerned, you might consider peeling your cucumbers. In the meantime, our field grown plants are perfectly healthy.
In other news, our organic certification inspection took place last Thursday. Although we won’t receive formal notification from PCO (Pennsylvania Certified Organic, our certifier) for a couple of weeks, it appeared to me to go well, and our exit interview highlighted nothing of concern.
Have a great week. Best wishes, Ted
PS. Windflower Farm hats are once again available for purchase. If you would like one or two hats, please preorder them here: Windflower Farm’s Hat Order Form. We’ll be closing the order form within the next couple of weeks and we’ll send them on the truck to your site a little later this summer. Stay tuned!
Central Brooklyn CSA 