Author: Central Brooklyn CSA

Central Brooklyn CSA and Windflower Farm CSA

Fresh, Local and Certified Organic

Dear CSA Member,

Happy Spring from Windflower Farm! On behalf of the Central Brooklyn CSA and the entire Windflower team, I write to invite you to join us for the 2023 CSA season – our 24th year on the farm. In the warmth and sunshine of our greenhouses, tens of thousands of spring and summer vegetables are getting their start. 

Members of the CSA will get 22 weekly deliveries of fresh, organically grown herbs, greens and seasonal vegetables of all kinds from our solar powered farm in the upper Hudson Valley. You’ll get bicolor sweet corn, tomatoes galore, colorful peppers, salad greens of every kind, cucumbers, carrots, squashes, red onions, shallots, broccoli, red cabbage, fingerling potatoes, fresh green beans, dill, cilantro, basil and much, much more. 

This year, we’ll continue to work closely with some of our neighboring organic growers both to enhance our offerings of vegetables and to mitigate some of the risks inherent in producing everything in one place. When we do decide to make a crop purchase, it will only be from a farmer we know and whose vegetables are certified organic.  

At Windflower Farm, we also have optional shares of brown eggs from a neighbor’s pastured hens, fresh fruits from our farm and throughout the Hudson Valley and a la carte offerings of local maple products and grains.

Our veteran farm crew is returning, and most are already busy in the greenhouse. They are not only experienced and responsible vegetable growers, but they have completely embraced the protocols around Covid-19 and USDA’s new Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). As a result, the team has stayed healthy throughout the pandemic, and we feel we are able to deliver a safe vegetable share to you each and every week of the season.  

We hope you’ll join us for the 2023 season. Please click this link to learn more and to purchase a CSA share: Central Brooklyn CSA – 2023 Membership Form (wufoo.com).

Why join a CSA? You’ll get to eat the freshest of local vegetables and you’ll be exposed to some new vegetables and new ways of preparing them. You’ll develop a relationship with the farmers who grow your food and the practices they use through weekly newsletters and Instagram postings (https://www.instagram.com/windflowerfarm/), and through our mid-summer open house on the farm. Perhaps best of all, you’ll get to be part of a community of your neighbors with a common interest in food, health and sustainability.

We’ll also be hosting our annual farm party again this season! Stay tuned for more information. 

Thank you for your generous support of our farm! Please follow the link above to learn more and to become a CSA member:

Our best wishes,

Ted and Jan Blomgren

Windflower Farm

The News from Windflower Farm

Happy New Year from Windflower Farm! Your third and final CSA delivery of the winter season will be arriving this Saturday.

If you cannot get to the site during the distribution window, please arrange to have someone pick up your share for you. Pickup times are noted below. All shares left after the pickup time will be donated to neighbors in need. We hope you enjoy your share.

Your pick-up time and location are noted below:

Central Brooklyn (1251 Dean St., 4:30 to 6:00)

What’s in your box?

• Ruby Frost apples plus either Jonagolds or Empires
• A jar of organic jelly from the kitchen of our neighbor Deb
• Butternut squash
• Celeriac
• Carrots, kohlrabi and Watermelon radishes
• French Fingerling potatoes and Covington sweet potatoes
• Yellow onions and Ed’s Red shallots
• Spinach and Toscano kale

The carrots and celeriac were grown using organic practices by our friends at Denison Farm.  The apples were grown by the Borden family and are not organic. All of the other vegetables were grown by us and are certified organically grown.  

French fingerling potatoes look very much like small sweet potatoes. Examine them long enough and you’ll see their differences. But if you still can’t, slice them open. The flesh of this potato variety is yellow, and the flesh of the Covington sweet potato is orange.

What’s new on the farm?

Snow has come and gone. The ground has frozen to a depth of three or four inches, but now it has thawed and become muddy. It’s been a strange start to winter. Our cover crops are happy to be out from under the snow and are again green. But our fall-planted garlic, onion, shallot and strawberry crops are not as happy to see the snow go. Their mulch is not enough. Robert Frost’s wish that his apples stay cold – “Better forty below than forty above”- is about the vulnerability of plants in the winter. Alternating warm and cold temperatures, something likely to occur with greater frequency in a warming world. Hope for snow. It protects plants from temperature extremes, it brightens the landscape and, besides, Nate and I bought ski passes for the very first time this year and we’d like to go skiing!

Thank you very much for being with us. We hope you’ve enjoyed your winter boxes, and we wish you and yours a happy and healthy new year!

We look forward to seeing you in June, Ted and Jan

Greetings from Windflower Farm! Your second CSA delivery of the winter season will be arriving this Saturday. 

If you cannot get to the site during the distribution window, please arrange to have someone pick up your share for you. Pickup times are noted below. All shares left after the pickup time will be donated to neighbors in need. We hope you enjoy your share.

What’s in your box?

• A bagful of apples from the Borden’s farm, including Empires and Honey Crisps
• A jar of honey from Derek Woodcock at Harry’s Honey House
• And from our farm:
• Butternut squash
• A bag of sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes
• A bag of shallots and another of mixed yellow and red onions
• A bag of kale from our unheated greenhouse
• And a bag containing Denison Farm carrots, our beets and the last of our ginger

Next month, you’ll get spinach and lacinato kale, celeriac, kohlrabi and watermelon radishes, Ruby Frost and Jonagold apples, a jar of Deb’s homemade organic jam and a host of the usual winter vegetables (onions, potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes, shallots, squash and beets).

What’s new on the farm?

December is our month for gathering supplies for the coming farm season. This week, it’s soil mix. On Monday, I travelled to Montpellier, Vermont to pick up the compost-based soil mix we’ve used for more than 20 years. Karl Hammer, who runs Vermont Compost, has been making some of the very best organic soil media for vegetable seed starting anywhere. We’ll post a couple of images on our Instagram page, including a shot of the pretty state capitol building. Next week, we’ll collect the row covers, mulches, organic fertilizers and drip irrigation supplies we’ll need. And later in the month, in what is our most important job of the winter, we’ll order all of our seeds. Which means we will have taken the lessons learned from previous seasons and the input from our shareholders and produced a crop plan that we hope will put us on track for a super 2023 farm season.     

Wishing you and yours a happy holiday season and a healthy new year, Ted and Jan

Pickup time and place for Central Brooklyn is:
1251 Dean St., 4:30 to 6:00

The News from Windflower Farm

Thank you for joining us for the winter CSA season. We hope you enjoy the healthy farm fresh goodies that come your way during each of the next three months. We’ve closed our winter share signup site and tallied the numbers. We’ll be packing 430 boxes this winter, exceeding expectations. Thank you for your support of our work. Your first winter share will be delivered this Saturday, November 19^th.

Your pick-up time and location is noted below:

Central Brooklyn CSA (1251 Dean St., 4:30 to 6:00)

The next winter share distributions will be on Saturday December 10^th and January 7^th.

Please note: 

1. A friend, family member or neighbor can pick up your share for you if you are not able to make it to distribution. Please ask this person to sign-in under your name.
2. Site hosts are not obliged to save shares for members who miss the distribution window. Any shares leftover after distribution will be donated to community fridges or food pantries and will help other community members in need. 
3. The farm is not able to send you a make-up share if you miss a distribution. The farm will send your shares on the distribution dates only. 
4. The farm will send you a newsletter a day or two before distribution. Please save these two emails to your preferred contacts list: windflowercsa@gmail.com and tedblomgren@gmail.com and check your SPAM folder if our newsletter does not make it into your inbox.
5. Watch for updates from site hosts on social media. Many sites post updates about the share on Instagram and Facebook.

What’s in your box?

• Red Russian kale, Lacinato kale and bok choy all packed in a plastic bag
• Potatoes and sweet potatoes packed in paper
• Carrots, orange beets and ginger in a plastic bag
• Yellow onions, shallots and the last of our garlic in a net bag
• Borden Farm ‘Jonagold’ and ‘Empire’ apples packed in paper
• Rosemary and butternut squash packed loose
• Borden Farm apple cider packed separately

News from the farm

Jan and Nate made a fantastic soup from Soups On! called “Vietnamese Pho Real Bowl” using the ginger, bok choy, shallots and carrots in this month’s share. You’ll also need cilantro, mushrooms, rice or rice noodles and vegetable stock. Several variations can be found online.

A hard frost and our first snowstorm of the year arrived this week. Last week, temperatures were in the 60s, and I thought we might be harvesting spinach and ‘Premo’ kale from the field. Instead, we’ll be harvesting ‘Lacinato’ and ‘Red Russian’ kale and bok choy from our small “caterpillar” greenhouses. After a week’s break from the summer CSA schedule, we’ve reconvened this week to harvest Rosemary and greens and to sort and bag your storage vegetables. While everything in your share (apart from the fruit) is organically grown, and most is grown here, it is not all grown by us. The carrots in this month’s share were grown by friends Brian and Justine Denison. More will be in next month’s share along with some of their gorgeous celeriac.

Our cover crops have filled in, carpeting the farm in green ahead of the snow. Our winter greens have been covered against the cold, and our storage vegetables have been tucked away. The row covers we use to protect crops from the cold and winds and pest insects have been sorted – the good, the bad and the good enough – and tucked by the barn. Plastic mulches have been picked up, drip tape has been rolled up for re-use, farm equipment has been put away and broken gadgets placed by the workshop for repair. We are prepared for the cold season ahead. Our work is done. And now it’s time to kick back a little and to enjoy family and friends around the holiday table.

Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving, Ted and Jan