Category: CSA

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Eggplants
• Tomatoes
• Sweet peppers
• Green Romaine lettuce
• Spinach
• Radicchio
• Sweet corn 
• Various summer squashes
• Your fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s ‘Zest Star’apples

Next week’s share will include carrots, green beans and spinach.

News from the farm

According to the Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalog, “the mildly bitter flavor of radicchio adds a nice touch to mixed salads.” The variety that we are sending this week is called ‘Virtus,’ which is a Sugarloaf type. Our Fedco Seeds catalog says that it “looks like Romaine crossed with Napa cabbage.” On her Lopez Island Kitchen Gardens blog, Debby Hatch says, “to cook it, I’ve braised the outer leaves in olive oil and garlic and served them as a side dish or as part of a pasta sauce. She has “also sliced the heads in half, brushed them generously with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and ground black pepper and grilled them.” Radicchio goes well with pears, nuts and Gorgonzola cheese, and with sherry or red wine vinaigrette.

It’s not much fun when things don’t work as they are supposed to. We awoke on Monday morning to find our cooler on the fritz. The thermometer read 55 degrees, too warm to keep vegetables for very long. I suspect that the problem originated with last week’s one-two punch: a heat wave followed by a power outage. Ready to tackle the problem, I put on my amateur plumber’s cap and coveralls. My spare parts box contained the previous year’s broken part – a motor contactor – but not a spare replacement (as it would have if I were a professional), so I headed off to my HVAC distributor in Bennington, a 90-minute round trip (where this time I bought two). But it turns out that the contactor wasn’t the broken part after all! And so, I called Gene, who, along with his dad before him, has taken care of our cooler ever since we bought the thing. But I was only able to leave a message, and I am sitting near the phone as I write. He’ll call; he’s very dependable. In the meantime: a precaution you might take at home is to bathe your greens in very cold tap water before putting them into the crisper drawer of your refrigerator. 

Have a great week, Ted 

P.S. It turns out that Gene did call. He spent all of 10 minutes here and the cooler is now working fine.

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Tomatoes
• Peppers
• Potatoes
• Oakleaf lettuce
• Arugula
• Mixed kales
• Parsley
• Bicolor sweet corn
• Squash

Your fruit share will be Pennsylvania peaches, the last of the stone fruits for this year, complements of Yonder Farm. Next week, we’ll send Pete’s apples.

News from the farm

August’s September-like weather has given way to September’s August-like weather. Sweaters have gone back on the hook and broad brimmed hats have again come out. The 2023 growing season continues to amaze with its meteorological roller coaster.

Field corn and soybean fields here seem to have gone off in one of two directions this year: they are either stellar or sad. Well-drained fields with ample nitrogen are on target to be very high yielding. But in poorly drained fields, crops are spindly, yellow and uneven. The exact locations of tile drainage lines can be discerned from the road. Corn growth is wavy, with tall, green, robust plants growing where the tiles are, and yellow, short and anemic plants growing in the in-between spaces. Unevenness can be seen in our last sweet corn field. The second planting went in just prior to a nitrogen-leaching rain, and the third planting went in during a drier stretch of weather. As a result, the size of the ears in the third planting will be much bigger. The good news is that size and flavor seem to be unrelated.  

Candelaria has made tamales for us, using a recipe that was her mother’s and her mother’s before that. She is a fabulous cook and knows that I love almost everything she does in her kitchen. I will take some tamales with me during my drive to the city tomorrow. I’ve come to consider my Tuesday delivery route to be something like a working vacation: a cooler full of good food, wonderful people to interact with, an excellent book on tape or good music to entertain me, a picture-window view, air conditioning and not a single important decision to make.  

Nate has put together an Instagram posting showing how we grow and harvest potatoes here. He’ll post it in the next day or two. We’ll send potatoes again in a couple of weeks, along with Rosemary. But it’s still summer for now, and more eggplant, summer squash and corn will be coming, along with peppers, tomatoes and salad greens.

Take care, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Tomatoes
• Peppers
• Eggplants
• Onions
• Sweet Corn
• Parsley
• Radicchio
• Kale or collards from Denison Farm
• Your fruit share will be Pennsylvania peaches complements of Yonder Farm.

Maple and grain shares will be delivered this week – don’t forget to check in!

News from the farm

A lush green is everywhere. Rose colored Joe Pye weed, purple loosestrife, boneset and cattails are in the wet places along roadways, and goldenrod is blooming. Cooler weather has set in with the arrival of August, perhaps a little prematurely. Rainfall is still regular, but it’s not unwelcome. August is typically a period of transition here: the salad greens that had become buggy or bitter in July are gone, and a new generation is coming along. Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are at their peak, as is sweet corn, but we are focusing our farm work on later crops. We weeded our sweet potatoes for the last time. We are cultivating fall broccoli, kale, and cabbage, and beginning to harvest potatoes. And we are sowing our last successions of beets, summer squashes, radishes, turnips, lettuce, and spinach. After this week, there will be just ten weeks left in  the CSA season.

I travelled through the lake country of northwestern Connecticut last weekend to pick up a potato harvester. Our old harvester was a large, unruly contraption; the only thing reliable about it was that it would break down regularly. It consisted of hundreds of chains, dozens of sprockets and a bent pto shaft, and had to be tended by half a dozen people to make it function properly. Weeds, rocks, and potatoes would jam in any of a dozen nooks or crannies, causing the tractor to kick and sputter, eventually grinding the whole operation to a stop. The new machine, an Italian import, is made of far fewer parts. The Italians farm on stony soils, like ours, and have developed tools able to withstand harsh treatment. It doesn’t have a single chain. If the old machine moved along the field like a loud, angry mob, this new one sashays, moving down the potato bedin a rocking motion, a harvest dance, a fine piece of machinery. Perhaps Nate will post a video on Instagram. In the meantime, he’s posted three short farm pieces just this week.

Take care, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Tomatoes
• Sweet corn
• Red and yellow sweet peppers
• Yellow onions
• Cilantro
• Lettuce
• Bunched red beets
• Beans – yellow wax or green
• Chiles (jalapeno and/or hungarian hot wax)

The beans will benefit from cooking. And probably from some kind of seasoning. I don’t know why they are so tough. These are popular varieties because they are usually tender and flavorful. Is it the result of the alternating hot and cold and wet and dry conditions that have prevailed this summer? Or is it because nutrients have been washed out of the soil by the excessive rainfall? I don’t know.

Here is my doom and gloom paragraph – feel free to skip ahead. A wet week is in the offing, and that is not good news for our onions, which we are in the process of pulling and field curing, or for our potato harvest, which we’d like to start but cannot because of the wet. Much of the lettuce that has not bolted has melted in the dampness. We’ll have a gap next week. The chard has Cercospora, the kale is buggy, and our winter squash is still weedy and waterlogged. It’s been a tough year!

Not all is doom and gloom. The young lettuce appears to love this rain. As do the sweet corn, beets, peppers, eggplant, carrots, sweet potatoes, and the new kale and chard plantings. And, because we grow tomatoes under protective covers, they are happy, too!

Your fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s blueberries. Peaches will be coming next week. These have been procured for us by Pete at Yonder Farm, but they will come from the Pennsylvania farm of a friend of his.

News from the farm

Nate helped me pull the sprayer out of the barn on Friday. You’ve probably seen the kind of thing I’m talking about: it consists of a large white tank and a 21’ wide boom and sits on the rear of a tractor. Ours covers three beds. Flea beetle populations in our fall broccoli and cabbage had become out of control. Insecticides are, of course, off limits to organic farmers. No Chlorpyrifos here. No Diazinon or Malathion. But we do spray sometimes, and when we do, it may well be some unusual stuff.

Rain came in multiple waves on Friday, so we woke early on Saturday to spray. It took an hour to prepare the sprayer – it was our first time out this season. We had to install the PTO roller pump, clean and install the spray nozzles, and then test the thing. We mixed a brew consisting of three ingredients: one was a fermented soil dwelling bacterium called Spinosad, another was an extraction from the root of chrysanthemum called Pyganic, and the last was mineral oil. A full 60-gallon tank can cover just an acre of crops, but that is all there was to spray. And thank goodness – the stuff was expensive. A quart of Entrust (the Spinosad product) costs over $600.

I worry that many of us fall prey to snake oil salesmen. I’m often surprised by what I’m told people add to their fields to achieve a little magic. Few of the products marketed to organic farmers have undergone efficacy trialing. In our need to control pests we are hopeful that we can purchase a remedy at the store, but we might also be too gullible or desperate. Twenty four hours later, I could see that the concoction we applied was effective. I didn’t see more than a handful of flea beetles in the entire field. The day before there were nearly that many on each plant. Thank goodness for a little snake oil!  

Have a great week, Ted