Category: Community

Winter Distribution #2, December 16th

The News from Windflower Farm

Your second box of the “winter” season will arrive this Saturday, December 16th. Please see below for the distribution timeframe for your pickup site.

What you’ll get this month

  • Red and yellow onions
  • ‘Ed’s Red’ Dutch shallots
  • Purple (‘Peter Wilcox’) and yellow potatoes
  • Red cabbage
  • Covington sweet potatoes
  • Bolero carrots (from Denison Farm)
  • Lettuces
  • Lacinato or Red Russian kale
  • ‘Honey Crisp’ apples (and a couple of ‘Empires’ or ‘Ruby Frost’) from Borden Farm
  • Honey from Harry’s Honey Shack
  • Plus a small butternut squash from the Denison’s 
  • All the vegetables in your winter share come from Windflower Farm’s certified organic fields except where otherwise noted.

Because we produce your winter share greens in unheated greenhouses, we don’t usually attempt to produce lettuces for the share – they are not especially cold hardy. But this year’s mild fall has meant that several beds have fared just fine. Please note that we don’t wash your greens during the winter – a quick rinse will make any soil particles and bugs disappear.

It’s easy to run out of ideas for dealing with crops like kale in the kitchen. But the Brassicas – and, like broccoli, kale is a Brassica – are superfoods, and finding ways to enjoy them is truly worthwhile. Here are two simple ideas. First, wilt kale into your eggs for breakfast. Or sauté kale with an onion, then add eggs, stir, and cook until they are the way you like them. Second, add kale to soup near the end of the cooking cycle. Kale (and spinach) can be added to virtually any soup. For lunch today, we added chopped kale to a carrot-lentil soup when we were reheating it. Kale adds color, flavor, vitamins, and nutrients, and contributes cancer-fighting compounds.  

Next month’s share will include red and yellow onions, shallots, miscellaneous potatoes, beets, sweet potatoes, greenhouse kale and spinach, celeriac, ‘Tendersweet’ cabbage, the Borden’s apples, and jam from the certified kitchen of our neighbor Deb.

Happy Holidays from the entire Windflower Farm Team!

Best wishes, Ted

PS. Here is a note and recipe from Kristoffer Ross about this month’s grain share. 

Hello Folks,

Kristoffer here from Hickory Wind Farm. For grain share subscribers, your items this week are a bag each of whole grain Rye and Red Fife Wheat flours, please remember to take both bags. I’ve included a recipe for rye bread below, should you wish to try it out, your share should be sufficient to make two batches. It was adapted from Our Beloved Sweden, a cookbook and folklore collection from Swedish-American families in the upper midwest about 30 years ago. The main alteration I’ve made is to replace the white flour with whole wheat, but if you desire a lighter loaf feel free to reverse this choice. Note that if using all whole grains note that the dough may not quite double in the course of either rising.

Regrettably, this month’s share will be the final one to include Red Fife wheat until autumn of 2024, due to a crop failure in the wet summer this year. I’ve saved back enough seed to replant in the spring, and we will hope for a slightly dryer July this time around.

Swedish Rye Bread

Makes 2 rectangular loaves, or one large boule.

  • 1 Cup warm water
  • 1 Cup skim milk
  • 1½ tablespoons yeast
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • ¼ cup molasses
  • ¼ cup white sugar
  • 1½ teaspoons salt
  • ¼ cup vegetable oil
  • 3 ½-4 cups Rye Flour
  • 3 ½-4 cups Whole Wheat Flour (or all-purpose white flour for a lighter loaf)
  • (Optional: rolled oats to sprinkle on top)
  1. Add the warm water, milk, yeast, and a single teaspoon of sugar to a large mixing bowl, stir and let stand 10-15 minutes.
  2. Add the molasses, remaining sugar, salt, oil, 3 ½ cups of rye, and 3 ½ cups of wheat flour.
  3. Begin kneading the dough, add ½-1 cup of flour gradually until the dough is stiff and no longer sticks to the bowl or your hands.
  4. Add to a greased bowl (flipping it to grease the top), cover, and let rise in a warm location for 1 hour.
  5. After an hour (dough may not have fully doubled) place on a floured surface, divide in half form into two loaves, and add to greased pans. Let the two loaves rise for 1 hour.
  6. Add to oven preheated to 375F, and after 10 minutes reduce heat to 350F. Bake a further 35 minutes. The bread is done when the bottom of the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. Remove and cool on wire racks.

Thanks to the Windflower staff and my family for enthusiastic taste-testing. As Ted has pointed out, it is best served with real organic butter. 

Wishing you warm, peaceful, and merry holidays,

~Kristoffer Ross

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Distribution #20, Week of October 9th

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

  • Sweet potatoes
  • Yellow onions
  • Green ‘Tropicana’ lettuce
  • Arugula
  • Radishes
  • Braising greens
  • Chiles
  • Sweet peppers
  • Eggplants
  • Tomatoes
  • And Denison Farm carrots

Your fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s ‘Ambrosia’ apples.

The last maple and grain share will be delivered to your sites this week. If you ordered a maple and/or grain share, please pick them up. The sites can’t hold them for you. 

It’s time for squirrels to stash their nuts and chipmunks to batten the hatches on their winter nests – the cold season is coming. We have been tucking vegetables into various corners of our barns for the winter.    

Winter share news

Our winter share consists of three deliveries of organic greens, vegetables, and fruits made between late November and early January. We started transplanting the greens that will go into the winter share today, a Columbus Day Weekend tradition. When all is done, we expect to have planted 12beds in six ‘caterpillar’ tunnels and 15 beds in three high tunnels, including three types of lettuce, plus tatsoi, bok choy, two kale varieties and spinach.The storage vegetables in the winter share will come from our farm (potatoes, beets, sweet potatoes, cabbages, red and yellow onions, shallots, and leeks) and our friends at Denison farm (butternut squash, carrots, and celeriac). The fruits (apples primarily, and pears if I can find any) will come from Yonder Farm and the Bordens. Each month, we’ll include a sweet treat of some kind, including fresh, sweet apple cider, local honey, and local jam. Optional shares of eggs, maple products and grains are available, too. We hope you’ll join us for the winter share. More information and a signup page can be found by following this link: Windflower Farm’s 2023-2024 Winter Share (wufoo.com).

News from the farm

Wind and a cold rain are taking our leaves before they’ve had a chance to fully turn. This year’s colors, at least in our part of the Hudson Valley, have been muted, but they are still lovely, and likely at their peak. The rain has just stopped, the sun has come out, and Jan and Nate have run outside to see the unusually bright double rainbow that has emerged from the gloom.

Nate and I planted nearly half the farm to a cover crop of rye last week, and the rainfall couldn’t have come at a better time. We’ll plant three or four more acres to rye this week, and we’ll make a final planting once we wrap up the vegetable harvest at the end of the month. Friends at Hickory Ridge Farm and The Farm at Miller’s Crossing are the sources of the organic cover crop seeds we’ve used. Some of it contains a quantity of hairy vetch seed, a nitrogen fixing legume. As often happens when working the fields, a red-tailed hawk followed the tractor I was operating, hunting a white-footed field mouse or rabbit the disc might send running.   

An independent organic certification inspector named David, who hails from Vermont and lives in his Ford van, came to the farm last week to conduct our annual inspection. The audit took half the time of last year’s and went off without a hitch, at least as far as I could tell. We’ll get a final notice from PCO, our certifier, in a week or two.   

I’ll keep you posted, Ted

Distribution #14, week of August 28th

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

  • Tomatoes
  • Potted basil
  • Red potatoes
  • Red onions
  • Lettuce
  • Arugula
  • Salad mix (mustard green medley)
  • Peppers
  • Squash

Your fruit share will be Pennsylvania peaches, again complements of Yonder Farm.

News from the farm

Many hands make little work at Windflower, which is a good thing because we pack almost 1000 CSA shares every week. On Mondays and Wednesdays, Candelaria and her son Fabian, are in the barn bagging up colorful tomatoes, while Salvador, Junior, Daniel and Miriam are harvesting vegetables in the field. Meanwhile, Victoria, Charlie, Ezden, and Kristoffer are in the packing shed washing greens, writing labels, putting everything into plastic totes, and cleaning crates when the packing is done. Ted and Nate are most often working on field projects like plowing, discing, prepping beds and seeding, while Jan might be packing herbs or off mowing and weed whacking around the farm. 

These days, I’m usually sorting and packing onions in the barn or greenhouse, which can be a long and lonely task. Today’s job was easier and much more enjoyable thanks to Annemarie and Jackie, two of our local share members who volunteer in exchange for a reduced-cost share. Annemarie and Jackie are sisters and they bring a lot of good energy and cheer even when faced with potentially unpleasant tasks like sorting onions. Unfortunately, some of our early red onions are a little past their prime. That didn’t stop us though! We donned plastic gloves and sorted out the gems, grading by size, and tossed the yucky ones into the compost bins. We also had a nice conversation about vegetables in the share and exchanged recipes. Before you knew it, we had most of the onions done.

We’re very grateful for our local share members who are volunteering with us this year. Next week, Ezden and Charlie are going back to school and our excellent volunteers will step in and help keep our packing shed running smoothly until the end of the season.

All of our CSA sites are volunteer led and powered. Every job is important: unloading the truck, setting up the site, checking in members, helping with distribution, cleaning up at the end of the day, writing newsletters, updating websites, answering emails, and all the organizing that happens before, during and after the season. Thanks to each of you and our dedicated core group members, we’re able to grow and distribute so much good food to you and your communities. We couldn’t do it without you.

Have a good week

Andrea

Week of October 24, Distribution #21

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in your share?

  • Butterhead lettuce
  • ‘Premo’ kale
  • Fingerling potatoes
  • Rosa di Milano onions
  • Rosemary or parsley
  • Garlic
  • Leeks
  • Butternut squash
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Chiles
  • Ginger
  • Carrots (our own babies if they have tops)

Looking back at the list of items we’d delivered over the season, Andrea noticed that I miscounted the number of weeks that we sent fruit. We did not start in week #1 as per usual. And for those of you at our Thursday sites, you’ll get a double share to make up for a recent missed week. So, it is this week that we deliver our final fruit shares. The share, which comes from Borden’s Farm, is comprised of Honey Crisp and Ginger Gold apples, two of my favorites.

This is the last CSA delivery for those of you who purchased half shares and pickup on odd weeks. I want to thank you very much for being with us and hope you have enjoyed this year’s offerings. For everyone else, next week’s will be your last delivery of the season. Information about our winter share and a sign-up link can be found below.  

We dug half of the ginger over the weekend, and Nate, who takes the lead with ginger, is washing it as I write. We’ll send it this week and next. If you need an idea for how to use it, you can add it to your favorite Thai recipe, candy it or make sugar snap cookies. Or you might make a turmeric-ginger tea to help lessen the severity of a cold and to reduce inflammation. This is fresh ginger; it is not as strongly flavored as the “mother” plants you’d get from the Tropics, nor does it keep very long. If you don’t intend to use it soon, freeze it, after which you can grate it into soups or other dishes.

The fall crops are now all in. Over the course of this week and next, we’ll cover those crops with a winter cold barrier, and finish cleaning up the farm. We have a few small greenhouses to take down and hundreds of yards of irrigation line to organize and tuck away for next year. Next Friday, four of our team head to Mexico for the winter. Soon Daren will head off to Poland to help in a Ukrainian refugee relief program. Andrea and her new husband will visit family in Germany. And the rest of us will take a bit of time off before diving into winter projects. Mine will be to restore a bunch of disused farm equipment for resale in the very active regional farmer-to-farmer marketplace.

The ginger crop reminds me of how far afield your money goes when you buy a CSA share at Windflower Farm. Our ginger seed pieces come from Biker Dude on the Big Island of Hawaii. And when his crop fails, he sources starts for us in Peru. We get sweet potato slips from North Carolina and Irish potato seed pieces from Moose Tubers in Maine. I am pleased that most of our suppliers can be found within a 200-mile radius of our farm. Our primary seed producers – Johnny’s, High Mowing and Fedco – are all in New England, but the seeds they sell, although increasingly local, can be from almost anywhere. The soil mix we use in our greenhouse is a blend we make using Vermont Compost in Montpellier and Fafard Organic Potting Mix from northern Quebec. Our cover crop seeds come from the Mid-Hudson, and our compost, which constitutes the lion’s share of our soil fertility program, comes from Western New York. When we buy produce, it always comes from nearby – your fruit comes from Yonder Farm in Columbia County and the Borden’s, who are 5 miles away, your beans, when they are not our own, come from Markristo Farm in the lower Teconics, and your carrots this year have come from up the road at Denison Farm.

There are two categories of expense on our P&L statement that are not local. One is fuel and the other is machinery. But even these expenses have elements that are local, including sales, delivery and repair. Economists have said that your local food dollars are spent 3 ½ times or more in the community before their economic benefit is exhausted. Our payroll and associated taxes and benefits represent by far our biggest expenses. If the supplies noted above and payroll together represent half a million dollars of CSA spending, which is about the case at our farm, the impact on our rural community might come in at close to two million dollars. I recall a co-founder of the NYC Greenmarkets telling me years ago that the city had always supported the countryside. I believe that to be true, but I also appreciate that this is a reciprocal arrangement.

I hope to get around to producing a survey that asks for your feedback about this year’s CSA shares and your overall CSA experience. If I don’t, please send me an email with the thoughts or suggestions that you think will help us improve in the future. Thank you.

Winter share news

It’s winter share signup season! A few years back, my friends at the Stanton Street CSA in the Lower East Side introduced me to the idea of “vegetable fatigue,” which they say can occur any time beginning around week 18 or 20 in the CSA season. Vegetable fatigue is a lack of enthusiasm for dealing with fresh vegetables. I completely understand. Going out to eat is the only remedy. A week or two to clear out the refrigerator helps.

Nevertheless, at the risk of wearing out our welcome, we offer a winter share. We finished planting our winter greenhouses on Friday morning. These are the greens that fill out the winter share. In total, we’ve planted four caterpillar tunnels and three high tunnels to a mix of choy, various kales and spinach – that’s twenty-three 140’ beds of greens. Every month, shares include a large bag of greens.

The winter share consists of three monthly deliveries that will include approximately 2 lb. of our organically grown greens (including spinach, a variety of kales and bok choy) and 8-10 lb. of our storage vegetables (including carrots, red and yellow onions, winter squash, a variety of potatoes, beets, leeks, sweet potatoes, shallots, and more), along with 4-6 lb. of fruits, and either apple cider, Deb’s homemade jelly made from her organic berries or local honey – all packed to fit in a returnable box – for $174.00

This year, we will only be offering three monthly deliveries instead of four. We have fewer crops going into storage and our farm team would like some time off.

We are minimizing our use of PLASTIC BAGS! We’ll pack loose where we can and use paper bags where we need packaging. Our GOAL will be to use zero plastic bags, but, because we want your salad greens to arrive fresh and we don’t have an alternative to plastic, we may use one plastic bag per month.

OPTIONAL shares include the EGG SHARE and MAPLE SHARE from Davis Family Farm and a GRAIN SHARE from Hickory Wind Farm (please see the details below).

Our deliveries are timed to coincide with the deliveries made to your CSA pickup site by Lewis-Waite Farm.

If you would like to register for a winter share, please sign up here:  Windflower Farm’s 2022-2023 Winter Share (wufoo.com). If you have already registered, thank you for joining us!

Have a great week, Ted

Distribution #21 – Week of October 25, 2021

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from Windflower Farm!

What’s in your share?

  • Garlic (2 large bulbs)
  • Ginger root
  • Green Romaine or red leaf lettuce
  • Tatsoi
  • Mustard mix
  • Radicchio
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Carrots
  • Leeks
  • Sweet peppers

This week’s News comes from Daren Carroll, a member of our staff. Next week we’ll send your last Windflower CSA boxes of the season. You’ll get Daren’s squashes, more ginger, garlic and sweet potatoes, a whole lot of greens and more.

Don’t forget to sign up for our winter share here: Windflower Farm’s 2021-2022 Winter Share (wufoo.com)

Have a great week, Ted

What’s new on the farm?

Hi! This is Daren Carroll, guest-writing for Windflower Farm this week. You may remember my name mentioned earlier- I’m a long-time worker at the farm (14 years? 15? Not sure), and I also grew some of the butternut and delicata squash you have received (or will next week). I operate my own farm in my spare time- and as I like to joke with the Blomgrens, I now come into Windflower a few days a week as my “recovery days.”

I thought I’d share a bit about how I grow my winter squash. My interests have included history,anthropology, and agriculture, so I like studying pre-chemical revolution farming, when everyone was organic by default. So I went and studied how the Haudenosaunee (pronounced Hoh-deh-noh-SHAW-nee, listen here) grew corn, pole beans, and squash together. This is commonly known as a Three Sisters system. Most of upstate New York was farmed and hunted by the Haudenosaunee, so I figured their system would work best for the climate. Native Americans from Central America to Canada used this system, but it contains many variations for latitude and rainfall. Very few people use it on any scale larger than a garden, since it’s not friendly to mechanized planting or harvest techniques. I do almost all the work by hand. I adopted the spacing as recorded in Parker on the Iroquois, by Arthur C. Parker, written in 1968, who interviewed folks who had learned the pre-colonial techniques directly from Seneca practitioners in the 1800’s.

So, my butternut and delicata was grown in the partial shade of corn hills. Seven or eight corn plants are sown together in hills that are 6 feet apart in either direction. The corn enjoys full sun, and while the hills are a bit crowded, they’re still able to yield well. Squash is then sown or transplanted, one or two plants between every corn hill. Squash generally likes full sun, but by the time the corn is casting shadows in late July, heat stress can be an issue in squash- so, a little shade now and then is actually helpful for the plant.

For the corn, I grow an heirloom landrace called Hopi Blue. I retail some as seed online, wholesale some to Fedco Seed Company, and finally, I make all the grits and tamales I want out of the remainder. I selected an heirloom pole bean called Iroquois Skunk Beans (named for their coloration), which I retail as seed. The squash understory provides weed control for those other two crops, so it’s nice to cart off several hundred pounds of it, long after it’s already paid for itself. Not that I don’t charge for it- Ted and I have a trade deal going!

These final squash deliveries are paying off the Farmall 140 cultivating tractor I got from him. If you’ve followed the newsletter already, you know of Ted’s fun projects in building new cultivating tractors, or modifying the various “Gs” that have come to the farm. So I scooped up one of the retired clunkers of the fleet, the old 140 I used to clock a lot of time on, hilling Windflower potatoes. These 140s used to be the workhorses of many row crop farms across America, and now they get scooped up by organic farmers. The wheelbase is 6 feet, 1 inch wide, so I adapted the Seneca corn hill spacing around that so the 140 can do some of the early weed control. I largely manage it with a weekly wheel hoeing ‘til early July, when the squash takes over.

If you want to learn more wonky details about how I do the Three Sisters plot, I have a page about it on my website-  (https://gradentalunfarm.net/pages/growing-a-three-sisters-plot) The site is also my portal for ordering the corn and bean seeds, and the many garlic varieties I grow. I specialize in heirloom varieties from around the world, and also a few newly bred types from true seeds via flower pollination- which is rare, but still possible. I am a bit of a garlic nut, and that’s the main focus of the site, but you can learn more about the Three Sisters systems and the varieties I grow. Meanwhile- enjoy the winter squash and other veggies coming- I know I’m loving butternut season! 

My main page- https://gradentalunfarm.net/  

-Daren