The News from Windflower Farm
The heat wave broke here on Wednesday with a cool blast of wind that knocked power out for several hours. It’s been one of our hottest summers on record and has, so far, been the driest August in 150 years of record keeping, according to our network TV weather forecaster. Half an inch of rain last week, the first rainfall of the month, gave some relief to the irrigation team. But with a deficit of several inches, they are back at work.
What’s in the vegetable share?
- Spinach
- Butterhead lettuce
- Sweet corn
- Sweet Peppers
- Tomatoes
- Basil
- Green beans
- Onions
The fruit share will be Denison Farm’s organic watermelons.
News from the farm
Jan, Nate and I got out to the fair on Saturday afternoon. We hadn’t been in four or five years, but we had a mission. Isaak, one of our high school-aged employees, had entered his artwork in the juried youth exhibit and had won special ribbons (and cash prizes!) for several of his pieces, including a black and white photograph of an owl, a remarkable collection of wood carvings, and a Lego farm diorama, and we wanted to see them. The kid should be in art school! Or skip school altogether and start an Etsy store. Our time at the fair included a visit to the sheep, goat and poultry exhibits and, of course, a stop at the forestry pavilion to indulge in one of the decadent maple milkshakes they serve there.
Daniel, Fabian, Miriam and Lizet, the youngest members of our field team, also went to the fair, heading straight for the blooming onions, as they do every year. Daniel told me that they were selling them for $15 per fried onion bulb and suggested that we open a booth next year!
Evan, another of our high schoolers, had entered the fair’s tractor pull earlier in the week. This is not the noisy flame and black smoke spewing tractor pull that brings contestants in from all over the Northeast (that was Saturday night’s featured event), but the garden tractor pull that features local kids and their souped-up lawn tractors. The lone rainstorm for the month of August happened to fall on the afternoon of their event, briefly turning the field into a muddy mess and the cancellation of the pull. Imagine the disappointment in working all year on your garden tractor only to have rain spoil the one day when you might have had a chance to show it off. He’s a resilient kid – I bet he’s already thinking about how to tweak his machine for next year.
We will lose our packing shed kids to school at the end of this week. Soccer and tennis had already started to call them away. I’ll miss their youthful energy and chatter and music.
In case you are curious, we have yet to identify the disease that has plagued our cucumbers. But we have not seen the telltale sporangia that we’d expect if it is downy mildew. Is it angular leaf spot after all? Or something new? I’ll keep you posted.
Have a great week, Ted
Central Brooklyn CSA 