Category: CSA

Delivery #13, Week of August 25, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

The heat wave broke here on Wednesday with a cool blast of wind that knocked power out for several hours. It’s been one of our hottest summers on record and has, so far, been the driest August in 150 years of record keeping, according to our network TV weather forecaster. Half an inch of rain last week, the first rainfall of the month, gave some relief to the irrigation team. But with a deficit of several inches, they are back at work.

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Spinach
  • Butterhead lettuce
  • Sweet corn
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Tomatoes
  • Basil
  • Green beans
  • Onions

The fruit share will be Denison Farm’s organic watermelons.

News from the farm

Jan, Nate and I got out to the fair on Saturday afternoon. We hadn’t been in four or five years, but we had a mission. Isaak, one of our high school-aged employees, had entered his artwork in the juried youth exhibit and had won special ribbons (and cash prizes!) for several of his pieces, including a black and white photograph of an owl, a remarkable collection of wood carvings, and a Lego farm diorama, and we wanted to see them. The kid should be in art school! Or skip school altogether and start an Etsy store. Our time at the fair included a visit to the sheep, goat and poultry exhibits and, of course, a stop at the forestry pavilion to indulge in one of the decadent maple milkshakes they serve there.

Daniel, Fabian, Miriam and Lizet, the youngest members of our field team, also went to the fair, heading straight for the blooming onions, as they do every year. Daniel told me that they were selling them for $15 per fried onion bulb and suggested that we open a booth next year!

Evan, another of our high schoolers, had entered the fair’s tractor pull earlier in the week. This is not the noisy flame and black smoke spewing tractor pull that brings contestants in from all over the Northeast (that was Saturday night’s featured event), but the garden tractor pull that features local kids and their souped-up lawn tractors. The lone rainstorm for the month of August happened to fall on the afternoon of their event, briefly turning the field into a muddy mess and the cancellation of the pull. Imagine the disappointment in working all year on your garden tractor only to have rain spoil the one day when you might have had a chance to show it off. He’s a resilient kid – I bet he’s already thinking about how to tweak his machine for next year.

We will lose our packing shed kids to school at the end of this week. Soccer and tennis had already started to call them away. I’ll miss their youthful energy and chatter and music.   

In case you are curious, we have yet to identify the disease that has plagued our cucumbers. But we have not seen the telltale sporangia that we’d expect if it is downy mildew. Is it angular leaf spot after all? Or something new? I’ll keep you posted.

Have a great week, Ted

Delivery #12, Week of August 18, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Cabbage
  • Arugula
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Tomatoes
  • Basil
  • Eggplant
  • Yellow onions
  • Green beans
  • Sweet corn

The fruit share will be more of Yonder Farm’s peaches.

If you ordered maple and grain shares for the August distribution, please pick them up this week. Please note, a few grain items will not be available this month. We will make these items up in October if possible. If you ordered grain this month, we will send you more details in a separate email. 

News from the farm

A Cornell extension agent has just left our farm. Our cucumbers have a disease and I’ve been stumped by it. I’m usually able to diagnose a vegetable plant disease after a few minutes with a dissecting scope, but not this time. I had dropped a note to Chuck, the agent, and to a Cornell University plant pathologist I know late last week and they decided our case was interesting enough to merit a lab analysis. Had it blown in from Canada or did it travel with the seed? Chuck had come to collect samples. Downy mildew of cucumbers had already taken out our field crop, which happens to most organic growers by the first week of August, and we suspected it was the culprit in the case of my greenhouse cucumbers. But the spots were the wrong color and the plants lacked any other telltale symptomatology, especially the dark fungal growth (sporangia) on the undersides of leaves. I was told to wrap some leaves in a wet paper towel and to reexamine them on Wednesday. I can’t wait.

A more likely contender is angular leaf spot, caused by a bacterium that can be seedborne. This fit because the spots were first detected on the cotyledons or seed leaves. A third contender, a nasty disease called scab, is also seedborne, and we’ve had it before. So, who knows? It’s my hope that incubating the pathogen in a petri dish will lead to a diagnosis. And perhaps to a plan for extending the cucumber season next year. I’ll keep you posted. In going down the list of diseases that can kill cucumbers, I’m happy that we can grow any at all.

It’s county fair week here in Washington County and the kids in the packing shed are bouncing off the wall today. (If I haven’t mentioned it: five teenagers from the neighborhood work here on Mondays and Wednesdays packing your vegetables. They’ll be going back to school soon.) The demolition derby is tonight and nearly all of them are going. Although none of them will be showing 4-H animals, several entered artwork and will find out tonight if they’ve won ribbons. The talk today was about tractor pulls, maple milkshakes and fried dough. It’s easily this agricultural county’s biggest happening all year, and I’m looking forward to going myself.   

Have a great week, Ted

Delivery #11, Week of August 11, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Lettuce
  • Swiss chard
  • Tomatoes
  • Peppers
  • Eggplant
  • Onions
  • Parsley
  • Assorted squashes
  • An organic greenhouse cucumber from our friend Andrew Knafle at Clearbrook Farm

We are between plantings of sweet corn. More should arrive in next week’s shares.

The fruit share will consist of Yonder Farm’s plums this week. We’ll be back to their peaches next week. Sorry, the fruit share will be peaches instead of plums this week! 

Thanks again and enjoy!

News from the farm

Sunday. I gave up after spending an hour or so reading the NY Times. I have no bandwidth left today for another of the Administration’s abominations. The only news I want today would have rain in the forecast. But search as I might among all three of my weather apps, I could find nothing but hot and dry for the foreseeable future. I water the plants in our greenhouse – the last cucurbits of the season and another round of greens – and then go in search of Nate, who is switching irrigation from lettuces, kale and basil in H2 to sweet corn and Nightshades in H1. These are fields we normally irrigate from the middle pond but, because of the need for water rationing in the north half of the farm, we are irrigating from the barn well. He is fussing with a booster pump he put in place to push water along the final 400’ of pipe.  

Seated at the kitchen table later in the day, I can see Nate in the Front field. He’s seeding with the Sutton Seed Spider, a tool we had shipped to us from the Salinas Valley in California. It is the seeder favored by growers of carrots and spinach. On Nate’s seeding list are arugula, a mix of salad greens, beets and Swiss chard. It’s August, so immediately following seeding he’ll set up some sprinklers. The earth is so parched that we’d get nothing without artificial irrigation. They are accustomed to this out West, but here it is still a part of the new normal of production.

My brother has passed by on a mowing rig, having just cut the grass in the sheep pasture near the barn. The sheep are now in their new summer pasture and appear to be loving it. They are Icelandic sheep and spend the hot part of the day in the shade. If you were to walk by their pasture after dark, however, you’d hear nothing but the tearing of grass and the chomping of sheep’s teeth. I have spotted fox or coyote droppings – I don’t know which – all around the barnyard and in the tunnel in which we are drying onions and garlic, but I have not spotted any of the responsible party. I worry about the chickens, which are nearby, but not the sheep, which are protected by a deer fence and an electrified net fence. Plus, although they might be small, their horns are formidable.

I think of Coastal Maine during the month of August and of lobster and swimming in cold water. To take me there, I’ve been reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s first novel, Stern Men. Remarkably, many if not most early lobstermen didn’t know how to swim.

Hoping you find a way to stay cool this week, Ted

Delivery #10, Week of August 4, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Sweet peppers
  • Summer squashes
  • Red onions
  • Magenta lettuce
  • Tomatoes
  • Basil
  • Sweet corn
  • Carrots from Denison Farm
  • The fruit share will consist of a pint of our own organically-grown blueberries.

As some of you know, we made a mathematical error recently that resulted in us sending fewer peaches than needed to a couple of CSA sites. Our sincere apologies to you if you missed yours. You will receive make-up peaches this week in addition to the blueberries in your regular share. 

News from the farm

I love sweet corn fresh off the plant and raw and eat quite a bit of it in the field. In this way it’s cool, crunchy and sweet. This first batch is running small because of the lack of rain, but it has most of the qualities that I’m after. So far, I’ve found very few bugs, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. A sweet corn tip: because insects get under the corn husk primarily by travelling down the silk channel, they are most often found feeding near the tip of the ear. The best way to deal with the potential problem of finding “worms” in your corn is to cut off about two inches of the ear tip before husking. There isn’t any corn worth eating at the tip anyway. The presence of these insects is difficult to detect, but a quick removal of the tip means you’ll never have to worry about it. Now, if you find a hole in the side of the husk, you are probably dealing with a corn borer, and that’s messier. We make every effort to feed those ears to the chickens, but the holes are sometimes hard to detect, and some will slip through. Insects are interesting, and if you are curious, peel the husk back and find out what’s going on inside.

We are harvesting our storage onions this week. Half the crop spent the week in windrows on the tops of their beds to kickstart the curing process. We’ll place these in crates and tuck them in the greenhouse to complete curing. Today, we are pulling the second half of the crop and will leave them in windrows for the next several days. Field drying like this shrinks the onion’s neck tissue and can stop or slow the spread of any disease from leaves to bulbs. The hailstorm that took place here three weeks ago mowed the tops off most of our onions. Unfortunately, they hadn’t quite attained their full size, but they are still good, and we are sending some of the red ones this week in bunched form.  

Have a great week, Ted

Delivery #8, Week of July 21, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Tomatoes
  • Basil
  • Beets
  • Fennel
  • Kale OR Chard from Denison Farm (your choice)
  • Lettuce
  • Cucumbers
  • Onions
  • Beans

Everything in your share was grown organically at Windflower Farm except for the kale and chard, which were grown organically by our neighbors at the Denison Farm. What’s coming soon from our fields? Sweet corn, sweet peppers and beans. Your fruit share will be a  quart of Yonder’s peaches.

News from the farm

Nate is using the Bezzerides Spyders today. His goal is to get through the last two plantings of corn, the second succession of beans and all the leeks. It’s an old-school tool made of steel fingers instead of the plastic that is more common with today’s cultivating equipment. It destroys weeds and gently hills the crop. If you were lucky enough as a kid to have a bike with a whirling pinwheel on the handlebar, you’d have a sense of the Spyder. Imagine making a pinwheel out of steel, turning it upside down, hanging it from the belly of a tractor, and dragging it through the soil. Now picture four of them in a gang, two for each crop row. You’d be pleasantly surprised by the result.

In Nate’s case, the Spyders are mounted on the belly of the latest of our electric tractors. This one is our ‘Ultralight’, made 750 lb lighter than our previous model by switching from lead-acid to lithium batteries and using a narrower gauge of steel in the wheels. We’ve also been using it with lighter weight implements. We had been breaking axles, which is not good, and needed to lessen the tractor’s torque requirements. So far, so good. Still, we are on the hunt for a more robust axle. We don’t want to have to pamper our equipment. To that end, we’ve begun working with a new producer of heavy-duty electric axles in Italy (unfortunately, this is just in time for Trump’s 40% tariff on everything coming from the EU). My search for a US-made axle has not been successful.

The team rallied last week in the wake of our hailstorm. We mowed ruined crops or turned them under, transplanted everything that was on-deck in the greenhouse, weeded greens that we might otherwise have let go, and stepped-up irrigation. Nevertheless, the impact of the storm will continue to be felt for a few weeks. Good news: last week’s Department of Agriculture and Markets produce safety inspection resulted in an A rating.  

On Saturday, after watering plants in the greenhouse, we put canoes on the Toyota pickup and headed to Boreas Pond Wilderness. Paddling among the loons, swimming in an Adirondack Lake, and relaxing with my family against the backdrop of the high peaks was just the thing for this tired old farmer.   

Have a great week, Ted