Author: Central Brooklyn CSA

The News from Windflower Farm

Happy fall from all of us at Windflower Farm, where one of our hottest and driest summers ever has given way to the cold temperatures of fall and warnings of early frost. By Thursday of last week, we had harvested all of our winter squashes. This week, you’ll get Delicatas. Acorns will be in your shares next, followed by butternuts. It’s become cold enough here to move back into the kitchen, and roasted squashes, squash soup and squash muffins are all on the menu. Yesterday, Nate made pumpkin muffins (with dried cranberries and chocolate chips) from a recipe he found at lovelylittlekitchen.com.

This week’s share

• Assorted tomatoes
• Colorful sweet peppers
• Carrots
• Dill
• Delicata squash
• Red and yellow onions
• Greenleaf lettuce
• Tatsoi
• Swiss chard
• German Red garlic        

Your fruit share will be a bagful of Pete’s Macintosh apples and Bartlett pears.

What’s new on the farm?

Killdeer have begun their flocking, and their numbers appear healthy to me. I like to think that they have found a safe haven here, but how can I know? I noticed them last week while working a field in preparation for cover cropping. Soon, they’ll head to Mexico, and they are looking to bulk up for the flight. The disc brings soil dwelling insects and worms to the surface and the flock swarms down to scoop them up. In the spring of the year, Killdeer would dread the coming of the tractor. They make nests on the ground after we’ve plowed but generally before we’ve planted. Because of their broken wing ploy, we can usually find and flag their nests so that we can avoid them as we pull the transplanter across the field. For a few days, their hatchlings are little flightless puffballs and a year or two back Jan could not resist the temptation to catch one in her hands (she is similarly hands on with snakes and baby rabbits). She may have frightened the little thing for a moment, but it was soon off doing what its siblings were doing, eating seeds or bugs. And now I imagine it as part of this flock making plans for Mexico.     

A week ago, the trees in our hedgerows were deep green. Today reds and oranges are peeking through, and in a week or two they’ll be in full color. We expect our first frost tonight. And so, a little too soon, summer is over. The Hudson River, which lies five miles west of here, at the end of our road, sits at an elevation of about 90’. Our farm lies some 800’ above the river, and that is what gives us some protection against the first frosts, which tend to snake along valley floors. I visited a friend whose farm is a mile east and perhaps 100 or 150’ above the level of the river. He told me that his first frost occurred two days ago and it caught him by surprise, spoiling a large portion of his winter squash crop. We had a little more time to prepare. Nate and I spent half a day on Wednesday dropping sandbags in all of the places where we intended to put row covers, and then a full day on Thursday rolling out covers, spreading them over the top of the cold sensitive crops and then repositioning the sandbags along their edges. The farm team helped with the last pieces – draping covers over the peppers and eggplants that now stand up to my shoulders. Had we not taken these steps, we’d be hard pressed to fill our truck during the final weeks of the season. Often, if our crops survive the first frosts, they will continue to grow for another three or four weeks, or as long as the Indian Summer lasts. In the meantime, it’s time to sharpen your skis!

Have a great week, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

Every other week, I throw eight five-gallon diesel cans in the back of my pickup truck and head into town for a refill. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, this translates into less than half a gallon per share per year, which has not changed much over the years. Our bigger use of fuel has to do with trucking from the farm to sites in the city, and that has likewise remained steady at about four gallons per share per year. As I drove to the filling station today, I thought about this week’s tasks. We will try to finish strawberry planting and continue seeding greens for the winter as we have been doing for the past couple of weeks. The greenhouse is full again with benches of spinach, Swiss chard, kale and other very cold hardy greens. It takes about an hour each day to do the watering. We’ll plant them out in our unheated greenhouses in early October, hoop and cover them with row covers and irrigate them twice a week. They’ll be ready for the first winter share delivery on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. More information about the winter share will be coming soon.  

This week’s share

• Assorted tomatoes
• Colorful sweet peppers
• Assorted potatoes
• Rosemary
• German White garlic
• Yellow or green beans
• Dill
• Squashes or cucumbers
• A mix of red lettuces
• Spinach
• Kale

Delicata squashes will be in some shares this week, and in every share next week. Eat right away – they do not keep very well. Simply wash, cut in half lengthwise, and bake face down for 45 minutes at 375 or until fork soft. Add a little butter and a pinch of salt or cinnamon. The skin is edible. Your fruit share will be Pete’s last peaches on Tuesday and his last plums on Thursday.

What’s new on the farm?

Two crops were particularly hard for us this year: carrots and potatoes. Hot and dry weather was the chief culprit in both cases, but several growers have pointed to the poor quality of seeds as another possible cause in the case of carrots. You’ll get the first of our potatoes this week. We’ll send our own carrots for a second time next week, and again the following week, and then we’ll be out until our late fall harvest (which was timed for winter shares).

We have purchased crops from neighboring farmers in the past. We set aside some money for the purpose. We don’t have success with every crop we grow, and we don’t want you to have a bad CSA experience. If our radicchio or celeriac or kohlrabi don’t work out, we are not going to go to the market looking to replace them, but if an important staple like carrots or onions or potatoes failed, we would go searching to fill the gap. We have only done this a few times in all of our years as CSA farmers, and we limit our purchases to local growers.

I’ve been trying to buy organic carrots with which to fill out your fall shares, but it turns out that we were not alone in having had challenges. And the local crop is lean. My friend Brian, who farms with his wife Justine, believes they will have some carrots for us, and Jody and Carrie, sisters who farm in Columbia County, expect to also have some. They are excellent farmers and farm on good soils, making them good candidates, with some prior planning, to help with the carrots in our 2021 shares, too. I’ll keep you apprised as to the source of carrots (and any other non-Windflower crops) as they show up in your shares.      

Have a great week, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

Happy Labor Day from all of us at Windflower Farm. Summer isn’t over yet, but we can sense it winding down here at the farm. It’s a time of transition in our fields and among our school-age staff. This week, you’ll be getting tomatoes, peppers, onions, chiles, cilantro and edamame – all warm weather vegetables. But fall crops are coming. Next week, you’ll get the potatoes and Rosemary we had hoped to send this week, along with Delicata squash and garlic. Greens have responded well to the cooler and wetter weather of recent weeks. This week, the greens category will be filled out with lettuce, choy and cabbage. Next week, you’ll get a different lettuce, plus kale and spinach. And you’ll still be getting tomatoes, peppers, and the occasional summer squashes and eggplants as long as the weather holds. 

What’s in your share this week?

• Tomatoes
• Peppers
• Onions
• Chiles
• Cilantro
• Edamame
• Lettuce
• Mei Qing Choi
• Cabbage
• Beets

If you are new to edamame, follow these simple steps: Steam for three to four minutes, sprinkle with salt and then eat, with a cold beer or without. To eat, place the pod in your mouth without letting go, then bite down gently, pulling the pod through your teeth, leaving the tasty little beans behind. Your fruit share will consist of Yonder Farm’s peaches. If they are a little hard, just let them sit for a couple of days.

What’s new on the farm?

We have a number of things to do during the next four or five weeks, giving some real focus to our early fall. Tomorrow, we’ll begin preparing the ground so that we can plant next year’s strawberries by the end of the week. We’ll also plant the last field greens of the season – spinach, arugula, a new red colored kale, Tatsoi, and a purple choy. And we’ll work on getting potatoes out of the ground. Next week, in the greenhouse, we’ll sow a variety of greens for the winter share and, in the field, we’ll plant red and yellow onion plants for harvest next spring. We’ll also sow cover crop seeds where we can and finish harvesting acorn and Delicata squashes and cabbages. 

During the following week, we’ll prepare greenhouses for winter greens by removing the non-performing tomato vines and old cut flowers, adding compost and tilling the soil. We’ll also be harvesting butternut squashes, leeks, sweet potatoes, and the remaining potatoes and carrots in anticipation of our first frost. 

The week after that, we’ll plant all of the winter greens in the greenhouses and prepare field beds for garlic and onion sets. This will entail more compost applications and bed forming and a session of garlic bulb busting (it’s the individual cloves that we plant and will become next year’s bulbs). And the last several weeks of the season will be spent planting garlic, which we’d like wrapped up by October 15th, and onion sets, which should be completed by election day. I’m sure it will unfold just like clockwork. 

Have a great week, Ted
—
Ted Blomgren
Windflower Farm