The News from Windflower Farm
What’s in the vegetable share?
- Green oakleaf lettuce
- Red leaf lettuce
- Swiss chard
- Slicing cucumbers
- Asian cucumber
- Zucchini/Summer Squash
- Sweet onion
- Purple kohlrabi
- Tomatoes
- Choice of Napa Cabbage OR Spinach OR Happy Rich Broccolini
The fruit share is a quart of Yonder Farm’s cherries or strawberries.
Coming soon: tomatoes, basil, bunched beets, and radicchio
News from the farm
We are harvesting the last of the overwintered onions and the first of the garlic today. The onions are a variety called ‘Forum’ that we’ve grown for years using sets produced in Holland, and they appear to have loved this season’s cool and wet spring. The garlic is a variety of ‘German White’ called ‘Music.’ Early indications are that it’s a lovely crop: good size, pretty color, and free of disease. Harvesting can be tough on the back, so we are bringing out some new tools. The first, a battery-powered electric hedge trimmer, lets us quickly trim the garlic to a length while it’s still in the field, allowing us to operate the tractor-mounted bed-lifter without separating the stem from the bulb. Following these two steps, it is much less difficult to pull the bulb out of the ground: we just grab it by its shortened stem and pull. We’ll place the garlic in bulb crates and place them in the greenhouse for a week of drying to help preserve the crop for future distributions. Nate has planted a half dozen other varieties that we’ll harvest in the same way next week. They go by names like “Ozark,’ ‘Estonian Red,’ ‘Shandong Purple,’ and ‘Idaho Silver.’ The fall-planted ‘Ed’s Red’ (Dutch) and ‘Crème Brule’ (French) shallots are next on the early Allium harvest list.
Other upcoming harvests: tomatoes and basil. Summer is here and these will begin to show up soon! I’ve had my first of the season in the form of a cold gazpacho on a hot day last week. Hmmm.
Have a great week, Ted
PS. If you ordered a hat, they will be coming on the truck to your site this week and next week. Please stay tuned for an email from us about when your hat will be delivered.
Central Brooklyn CSA 