Author: Central Brooklyn CSA

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from the Windflower Farm! Rain showers here this week have been light but very helpful. The massive storm that soaked New York City and the lower Hudson Valley did a clockwise run around the farm. This week, we’ll be harvesting garlic, planting fall broccoli and continuing the long process of getting ahead of the weeds.

What’s in your share?

• Yellow ‘Forum’ onions
• Leaf lettuce
• Red bunched ‘Boro’ beets
• Swiss chard
• Mixed kales
• Summer squashes/zucchinis
• Slicing cucumbers
• Tomatoes
• Potted parsley or Thai basil

Your fruit share will be blueberries from Yonder Farm. Our own will be coming soon.

Tomatoes are just starting, but the crop looks good. Fennel will be coming next week, sweet peppers, corn and beans are around the corner – the vegetables of summer are nearly here.   

What’s new on the farm?

We will continue to prepackage your shares all season, and perhaps well into next year, depending on the availability of an effective vaccine. The safest distribution system continues to be the one that requires the fewest hands. But we’d like to get away from the boxes we’ve been using when and where we can. They are very expensive and produce quite a bit of waste. It might surprise those of you who are new to us, but, with the exception of a site that lacks storage facilities, we have not had to use boxes or bags ever before – instead we have used a returnable, washable tote.

We’ll begin to move away from boxes at some sites as early as this week (this will not apply to local shares or the park site in Washington Hts.). We’ll do it in a way that won’t require any more hands than in our first few weeks. We’ll pre-bag at the farm just as we have been doing, and instead of putting the bags in boxes for you to take home, we’ll put those bags into tubs – perhaps four per tub – that will be left at the site. This one simple change will reduce from the waste stream as many as a thousand boxes per week. When we bring the tubs back from the city to the farm, we will wash them under high pressure using a bleach solution, and then we’ll let them sit in clean storage for several days prior to reuse. Tomatoes and occasional other items will be packaged separately, much as is your fruit, so they are not damaged in transit. These will be handed out by a CSA volunteer – the only non-farm individual to handle your food package. Please tell me what you think. And thank you for bearing with us as we work through these logistics.    

Have a great week, Ted 

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from the Windflower Farm team! We hope you had an enjoyable Fourth of July weekend.

What’s in your share?

• ‘Bianca’ (white Cipollini) onions
• ‘Panisse’ (green oakleaf) lettuce
• ‘Boro’ (red, bunched) beets
• Swiss chard
• Mixed kales (transitional and perhaps a little buggy)
• Garlic scapes (truly the last)
• Summer squashes or zucchinis or cucumbers (remember, “C” is for cucumber)
• ‘Hakurei’ (sweet, white) turnips
• Your fruit share will be sweet cherries from Yonder Farm.

Pan fried and caramelized Cipollini onions on a slice of toasted bread with garlic butter is a favorite here. They’ll also enhance any pizza. Beets that are boiled, skinned, chopped into chunks and let to get cold in the refrigerator is another treat, and excellent served alone or as part of a salad.   

What’s new on the farm?

The good news here is that the farm experienced a series of rain showers over the course of the last week, giving us 1.25” overall and a much needed break from irrigating. The back pond came up nearly four feet and the bigger pond in the ravine came up a foot or more, replenishing our stock of water. The storm that delivered the most rain came with powerful winds that took out power lines and knocked trees down throughout the region. A large black walnut, at least that’s what I think it is based on its leaves and dark brown heartwood, was blown down across the ends of four of our pepper tunnels in a back field. The damage to the structures was significant, but crop loss will be minimal. I’ll post an image to our Instagram page. The number of rain deities is dizzying, but I’ve prayed to all of them, and this much I believe, that the one that heeded our call has a slightly malicious sense of humor. After having had so little precipitation thus far in the season, I am grateful for what we got, even if Nate and I will have to spend an afternoon with chainsaws and a pipe bender.

Have a great week! Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

Greetings from Windflower Farm where it continues to be hot and mostly dry. Too dry for crops, that is, but wet enough for weeds.

What’s in your share?

• Oakleaf lettuce (lime green)
• Radishes (red)
• Arugula
• Mixed kales
• Garlic scapes
• Green onions
• Summer squashes or zucchinis or cucumbers
• Kohlrabi (green)
• Hakurei (sweet, white) turnips

“C” is for cucumber. Cucumbers and squashes are just getting started, and we don’t have quite enough of both for everyone. So we are asking you to choose one or the other. We’ll write the letter “C” on boxes containing cucumbers, and nothing on boxes containing summer squashes or zucchinis.   

You will be seeing the last of our garlic scapes this week. The scapes can be run through your food mill and added to butter or Earth Balance to make a flavorful, garlicy spread. Heat and drought stress have made our garlic crop mature a couple of weeks earlier than usual. It looks like it may be ready to harvest as early as next week. We’ll cure them in the barn for a few weeks prior to sending them to you.

I think that kohlrabi is best eaten raw, sliced thin as part of a salad, or sliced thick and dipped in hummus, pesto or your favorite vegetable dip. In this way, it can be an early season stand in for carrot sticks or celery.

Sweet, white Japanese turnips are my favorites among the many turnip options out there. They are not as strongly flavored as the Crimson Reds and Purple Tops you find in the fall or as imposing as rutabagas. Sliced and sautéed in olive oil and garlic, they make a surprisingly sweet and tender side dish. They can also be prepared raw, as you would radishes in a salad, and you’ll find them to be more mild.  

Your fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s sweet cherries.

Beets, cucumbers and Swiss chard should be coming next week. Tomatoes are sizing up and breaking yellow and will be in shares soon.

Have a great week, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from Windflower Farm. It’s been a very hot, dry week here. Irrigating, planting, weeding and more irrigating have been the theme. 

What’s in your share?

• Garlic scapes
• Scallions
• Summer squashes
• ‘Kalebration’, a mix of several kale types
• Arugula
• Mei Qing Choi
• Romaine or red leaf lettuce
• Butterhead lettuce
• Kohlrabi

Your fruit will be the last of our organic strawberries. Flower shares will be delivered to all of our sites this week. Next week’s vegetable shares will include more salad crops, including sweet Japanese turnips, kohlrabi, green onions and salad greens, along with summer squashes.

What’s new at the farm?

Summer rainfall is hit or miss in the Hudson Valley, and so far, at least for us, it’s been nearly all miss. The ground where we have not irrigated is as dry as beach sand, and even the smallest vehicle sends out a plume of dust as it travels our farm roads. We are parched and desperate for rain. It’s a heart breaker when the next town over gets two inches of rain and you get nothing. We can be happy for our farming friends over the hill, but it still hurts. You cannot help but to think of the many hours and days that a single four hour rain can save. Our two vegetable fields are 12 and 24 acres in size, and, running two irrigation systems simultaneously, it takes about ten days to get them adequately watered – just in time to start the cycle all over again. It’s now been a few weeks of this, and our ponds are running quite low. Our wells are holding up but we are worried, and we are hoping for rain. In the meantime, we are switching over from sprinkler to drip irrigation everywhere we can. Beets, carrots, onions, potatoes, corn – all ordinarily sprinkler irrigated, now have drip lines on them. There is no cause for panic. I tell you all of this because, as members of our CSA, you are in this with us. You have done your part in that you have paid for a share and agreed to take on some of the risk, including the risk of drought-related loss. I want you to know that we are doing our very best every day to hold up our end of the bargain.

 Best wishes, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

Greetings from Windflower Farm. Although we had showers last week, we continue to irrigate. Rainfall totals in Albany are 3.5” below normal, and I think that we’ve been drier here. But dragging irrigating pipe around is not all we’ll do this week. We’ll wrap up winter squash transplanting, we’ll sow successions of corn, beans, cucumbers and greens, and we’ll weed onions, potatoes and cabbages.

What’s in your share?

This week, you’ll be getting more salad crops.

• Magenta, a red leaf lettuce
• Green Forest, a green Romaine lettuce
• Ruby Red Swiss chard
• Toscano (a.k.a. Dinosaur) kale
• Garlic Scapes
• Red radishes
• Scallions
• Potted purple, green or Thai basil

Your fruit share will be our own organically grown Chandler strawberries. When ours run their course, you’ll get strawberries from Pete at Yonder Farm, and then back to us for blueberries. Flower shares will be starting at many but not all sites this week. Egg shares from the Davis Family farmstead started last week. Next week’s vegetable shares will, as advertised, include more salad crops, including kohlrabi, a CSA favorite, or sweet, white Hakurei turnips. Squashes are getting close.

Keeping your share longer than just a day or two takes a few simple steps. First, remove your share from the bag it came in. Please try to reuse the bag if you can. It will make for a good trash bag liner if nothing else. Second, rinse everything, particularly the greens, in cold water. Third, spin or gently shake the greens to remove excess water. Finally, place the contents of your share in a perforated bag in the refrigerator. The crisper drawer is made for this, but the bottom shelf will do.  

What’s new on the farm?

I picked up Angelica, Elisa and Martin Medina at LaGuardia on Friday. For fifteen years or so, members of the extended Medina family have come from Laguna Prieta in Guanajuato, Mexico to help us out at the farm. The shutdown caused by the Coronavirus made them two months late in getting here, and I am very pleased that they have finally arrived. There is still a good deal to plant and the farm is getting weedy – we are all happy to have the reinforcements.

Angelica and Elisa are Martin’s aunties, and they will live with their sister Candelaria in Cambridge, who has been counting the days until their arrival. Today was their first day together on the farm, and they talked and laughed all day long as they weeded the shallots and red onions, catching one another up on what’s been going on in the lives of their families. Martin will be living with us in an apartment on the farm. Daniel, Candelaria’s 20 year-old son, has decided to live here with Martin. There are too many aunties, he says, for his small house. Salvador, Candelaria’s husband, jokes about moving here, too, but he won’t, because the three women he’ll share his home with this summer are fantastic cooks, and he knows that he’s in for one great traditional Mexican meal after another, fully aware of his good fortune. 

I hope you have a great week, Ted