Author: Central Brooklyn CSA

The Central Brooklyn CSA (CBCSA) is dedicated to working with our partners the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, Windflower Farm, and the Hebron French Speaking SDA Church to continue the work of building a Community Supported Agriculture model that increases access to fresh, local produce for all members of our communities, regardless of income level. Join us as we continue to bring fresh, organic, affordable and nutritious vegetables and fruit to the Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, and surrounding communities.

Delivery #18, Week of September 28th, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Spinach 
  • Mustard Greens
  • Radicchio
  • Parsley
  • Leeks
  • Broccoli
  • Beans
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Pie Pumpkins OR Delicata Squash
  • Tomatoes

Your fruit share will be fresh Empire Apples from Yonder Farm.

News from the farm

It rained on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, giving us a total of more than 3 inches. Hallelujah! It was so much rain all at once that our electronic rain gauge couldn’t produce a reliable figure. Already, it seems, the grass is greener. And we’ve been able to move on to other activities. We live just 35 miles south of the Adirondack Park “blueline.” To celebrate the arrival of rain, we went paddling for the day in Lower Saranac Lake, where we enjoyed the company of loons and peak fall colors.

Our soils are rolling and rocky, making them less than ideal for the kind of work we do. Still, they are highly productive soils and have yielded record corn crops and some very good vegetables. The rolling aspect of our farm is not a great problem, and not one that can be easily remedied anyway. To be sure, it can make the tractor ride more exciting. We’ve learned that brakes should be fully operational. Having adapted to being hill farmers, we’ve also learned to farm on the contour to prevent erosion. 

Rocks, on the other hand, can be a problem. Hand picking, something we’ve done for 25 years, has helped, but it hasn’t been enough and it is back breaking. Last December, we made the decision to spend some of our equipment budget on a Rock-O-Matic, a big pull-behind rock picking machine.  We found one in Ontario and had it shipped here just ahead of the Trump tariffs. Because potato harvesting brings a huge number of rocks to the surface, we decided to start our rock picking there. The quantity of rockscoming out of the field has been staggering. Our farm won’t be stone-free overnight, but the improvement makes me think that we might grow straight carrots here one day!

Have a great week, Ted

Delivery #17, Week of September 22nd, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Lettuce
  • Arugula
  • Bok Choy
  • Tomatoes
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Bunched beets
  • Yellow Onions
  • Yellow Potatoes
  • Delicata Squash

Spinach, carrots, cilantro, red onions and radicchio will be coming next week. Next week’s tomatoes may be the last of the season.

The fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s Bosc pears. We expect to send apples next week.

News from the farm

A couple of Eastern Wood Pewees are chatting away outside my window on this first day of fall. I imagine that they are discussing the drought, which is surely impacting their lives as much as it is ours. It must make finding drinking water more difficult. Is finding food more difficult, too? I’ve noticed that there are far fewer insects.   

We are fortunate in having a deep and plentiful well. It was drilled for us by Clarence Gould and his son, Clarence Jr. In return for our $6,500, they promised us 12 gallons of water per minute and ended up giving what they estimated to be a hundred. Jan spent the day with them while they drilled, which may have encouraged them to prolong their drilling. We ended up with a well that is 470’ deep and a resource that has been our salvation on more than one occasion. While our two ponds and newest well have gone dry, this one deep well keeps our greenhouses, field crops and produce packing station going. It is no exaggeration to say that without irrigation, we’d have been unable to produce a single crop this year. It’s been that dry. Yesterday, Nate irrigated Swiss chard, spinach, bok choy, kale, lettuce and arugula. Today, he irrigated two blocks of broccoli and cabbage.

It’s been a tough growing season for more than those of us who grow vegetables. Nearby dairy farmers are under stress, too – some have had to bring outside water to their herds and, because they expect declines in forage and grain production, will have to purchase additional feed. The drought is widespread. NASA has reported that the rate of drying of the Earth’s soil has accelerated worldwide. Dry places are getting dryer, while wet places are not getting wetter. Locally, the level of Lake Champlain is five feet below where it was in July. This fall, many trees are bypassing their colorful foliage stage, going directly from green to brown.

We had a first-hand peek at ground water levels here at the farm when we did some work on our well last week. Normally, ground water lies 12’ below the surface here, but now it is 16’ below ground level. We have invested nearly $3000 in cover crops seeds this year, but we’re not sure if they will germinate and so they sit in our barn unplanted. The 10-day weather forecast promises hit-or-miss showers, and we remain hopeful.

Have a great week, Ted

Delivery #16, Week of September 15th, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Butterhead lettuce
  • Lacinato kale
  • Mustard mix
  • Garlic
  • Tomatoes
  • Peppers
  • Happy Rich broccolini
  • Sweet corn
  • Adirondack Red potatoes Fresh green beans
  • Summer squash/zucchini
  • Chiles

The fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s Bartlet pears. We expect to send Bosc pears next week.

News from the farm

September is a wonderful month. My favorite: cool nights, warm days, dry weather. Rain would be welcome, but there is nothing in the ten-day forecast. Fortunately, our irrigation hardware and our schedules seem to be working. They are stressed and could stand improvement, but they have been satisfactory. Perhaps we’ll take a trip to California this winter to see how they water their crops in that near-desert landscape. It is also our good fortune that Nate, our chief irrigation engineer, is young and is still holding up well, if looking a little tired. An additional reason to enjoy the cooler weather of September is that heating up the kitchen for meal preparation is pleasant once again. Last week, Jan made an incredible ginger-carrot soup and this morning she made sweet potato lasagna (this time with cardamom and cinnamon). Carrots and sweet potatoes will be in your shares very soon: carrots from our friends at Denison Farm and our own sweet potatoes once they’ve been cured in our hothouse. Summer comes to a close at the end of this week. Tomatoes will gradually be replaced with potatoes and winter squashes will take the place of summer squashes and zucchinis. After another week of pears, your final five fruit shares will consist of apples, mostly varieties good for eating out of hand, but also apples suitable for baking.    

Have a wonderful week, Ted

Delivery #15, Week of September 8th, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Lettuce
  • Arugula
  • Garlic
  • Yellow onions
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Winter squash (acorn squash)
  • Tomatoes
  • Parsley
  • Potatoes
  • Sweet Corn

The fruit share will be the last of Yonder Farm’s peaches. We expect to send Bartlet pears next week. Fall plums and all kinds of apples are on the horizon.

News from the farm

A much-anticipated weather system late last week delivered just one tenth of an inch of rain, and so our drought continued. The lawn is brown, as are the trees out the kitchen window. Some golds and reds are evident as the fall foliage season gets underway. It is Saturday afternoon and once again we await the arrival of a system that is supposed to bring rain. I have withheld a spray of the fungus Spinosad, which would reduce flea beetle populations in our arugula and broccoli, in the understanding that rain would wash off the expensive material. In the meantime, Nate has been wiring a voltage converter that will enable us to bring an old well online. It might rain and it might not, but irrigation goes on. What a year!

Daniel, whose grandfather Ezequiel was our first foreign employee nearly twenty years ago, has worked with his extended family on our farm ever since his high school graduation. There is very little on the farm that he can’t do, and that extends to his role as our delivery truck driver. He became a citizen last year and he married Lizet, a young woman from his hometown of Laguna Prieta in Guanajuato. Lizet joined our field team last year and is working on her tractor driving skills and English language proficiency. Daniel and Lizet have just received promising news from USCIS regarding Lizet’s petition for permanent residency (aka, a green card) – a final determination interview has been scheduled for late October. It is hard to overstate what this petition means for the economic future of this young couple. We are cautiously optimistic.

We attended a Town Hall last night featuring Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin who came to Glens Falls to give a boost to the campaign of Blake Gendebien, who is trying to unseat Elise Stefanik, our representative in Congress. Of obvious interest to me are both that Blake is a dairy farmer who recognizes the challenges associated with my kind of business and that he appreciates and values the role of our guest workers and the vital importance of treating them with dignity and respect.

Tired of waiting for this latest weather system to develop, I’m about to prepare beds for the last field seedings of the season. Nate has made a blend of the seeds of several mild mustard greens, kales, and choy and will sow them shortly afterwards. I’ll also prepare for the last of our transplants, including kale, choy and lettuce. After a difficult summer greens season, made especially hard by the combination of hail and heat and drought, the late summer is shaping up to be better for greens. Radicchio, spinach, arugula, lettuce, escarole, bok choy, Swiss chard, mustard mix, and Red Russian kale are all coming during the next few weeks. Just as I was heading out, it started to rain, delivering just a quarter inch in total, but enough to make plants happy and to keep us out of the field for the rest of the day.

Have a great week, Ted