Category: Farm

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from Windflower Farm!        

What’s in your share?

• Lettuce
• Collards
• Red potatoes
• Bok Choy or chard
• Sweet peppers
• Assorted tomatoes
• Genovese basil pot
• Yellow and red onions
• Sweet corn
• Garlic

Cabbage and beets will be in next week’s share. Squashes will return in another week or two, and carrots should be ready in another couple of weeks.

Your fruit share will be watermelons from us. Soon, stone fruits will be giving way to pears, apples and cider.

What’s new on the farm?

It’s county fair week here in Washington County, and our fair, or so goes the claim, is the largest agricultural fair in the state. This doesn’t surprise me – everyone here seems to have something or other to do with farming, and agriculture is by far the leading economic activity in the county.

Like many of you, Jan, Nate and I have rediscovered bicycling during the pandemic, and in seeking out new bike routes we have rediscovered the beauty of our working landscape, which is a mix of orchards, vegetable fields, rows of grains, giant swaths of hay and alfalfa and woods, especially on hillsides and along waterways. A farmstead can be found around virtually every turn in the road, with horses, cows, sheep, chickens or goats in the farmyard.

After getting out for a morning bike ride on Sunday, Jan, Nate and I washed the red potatoes that will be going into this week’s share. To wash root crops, we use a machine with rollers and brushes and banks of fresh water spray nozzles. My job was to tip the crates of freshly dug potatoes into the machine’s hopper. Jan’s was positioned on the outflow conveyor and tasked with inspecting the crop and tossing bad potatoes into the compost bucket. Nate gathered the potatoes that made it past Jan into clean totes and stacked them on pallets ready for today’s packing.

The first thing we noticed after removing the soil from the potatoes was that every tenth potato or so was weirdly creased and deformed. Many were so bad that Jan had to toss them. “These would win the ugliest potato contest at the county fair!” she said. It was not a problem we had encountered before. Puzzled, we did a little homework, and it turns out that many potato varieties, especially the early ones, will be deformed in seasons where poor growing conditions (the hot and dry weather of May and early June of this year) are followed by relatively good conditions (the regular rainfall of late June and July). Concerned, we checked our unwashed inventory. Happily, the second and third varieties we harvested, which were a few weeks later to mature, seem to be largely free of the malady.                    

Have a great week, Ted    

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from Windflower Farm!  Good news: Henri brought us very little rain or wind.       

What’s in your share?

• Lettuce
• Cabbage
• Sweet peppers
• Assorted tomatoes
• Mizuna
• Bok choy
• Yellow and red onions
• German White garlic
• Eggplant or squash
• Sweet corn

Your fruit share will be peaches from Yonder Farm.

We harvested red potatoes last week, and we’ll send them as part of next week’s share.

What’s new on the farm?

It is Monday afternoon and I have just snuck away from the assembly line. The pandemic has added this element to our packing operation. Many of you will remember that we used to send our vegetables in bulk, using recyclable plastic totes. But we decided last spring that pre-packed boxes are a requirement until the pandemic is over.

My job had been to put tomatoes in your box, but I’ve abandoned my station in order to get a quick newsletter off to you. The assembly line is a simple one, and I don’t think I’ll be missed. Abe sets a pre-folded box on the roller, places a cabbage in a corner and shoves it along to Kristoffer, who places an eggplant or two and two peppers in another corner of the box and pushes it down the line. Jan is next, and she puts red and yellow onions in the box. Her work requires a little sorting and represents the slowest stretch on the line, giving the rest of us occasional breaks and chances to chat. Nate is next in line and he puts garlic and bagged green beans in the box and pushes it along to Andrea, who puts lettuce and kale in a corner and then pushes the box up to me. Because four of us had spent the morning sorting and bagging your tomatoes, my job was nothing more than setting a bagful of tomatoes in the remaining corner of the box. Victoria takes the box from me, closes it and sends it up to Daren at the end of the line. With me gone, she also deals with the tomatoes. Daren arranges the boxes on pallets and rolls them into the cooler where they will remain until loading early tomorrow.

It has become routine now, this business of assembling boxes full of vegetables. Seven people harvest your shares over the course of two to four days a week, depending on where we are in the season. That work is rain or shine. The box making, produce washing, bean and tomato bagging and final filling of the boxes takes seven people a full day twice a week. It’s not bad work, and the packing shed is a comfortable place to be, especially when it’s raining or extremely hot.

Have a great week, Ted               

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from Windflower Farm!      

What’s in your share?

• Red Romaine lettuce
• Bunched mizuna greens
• Sweet corn
• Sweet peppers
• Assorted tomatoes
• Genovese basil
• Red Russian kale
• Yellow onions
• German White garlic
• Eggplant 

Fruit share members will get one quart of peaches from Yonder Farm

What’s new on the farm?

Although I wouldn’t be so bold as to say we’ve outsmarted our resident raccoon family, we have learned a simple trick this week: don’t be in a hurry to mow down the old corn crop. Our first generation of corn was planted near the back fence line, next to a woodlot and pond – prime raccoon habitat. Viewed now, it was obviously a poor choice of locations. The second generation of corn, the product of which is in your shares today, is growing in the next field, but two city blocks and a hedgerow away from the first generation. And, happily, it has been free of raccoons. Because they still have plenty of corn to eat in the first planting they have had no reason to send out an exploratory team. Perhaps by the time they have eaten all there is and have had to move on to planting #2, we will have moved on to the western part of the farm, two fields and two hedgerows away, where planting #3 is located. The corn variety you’ll be getting is called ‘American Dream’ and it’s one of the few really good organically grown sweet corn varieties on the market. Visitors this weekend grilled some for us, but I continue to think the best way to eat sweet corn is raw, freshly husked, with the fragrance of leaves and silk in the air and kernels still on the cob.

Have a great week, Ted 

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from Windflower Farm where the weather has been beautiful all week!       

What’s in your share?

• Sweet corn (just a little)
• Sweet peppers
• Fennel
• Tomatoes
• Collards
• Yellow onions
• Dinosaur kale
• Squashes or cukes or cabbage

Sweet corn, collards and sweet peppers are this week’s new crops. Collards, with their ribs shaved thin and steamed for a few minutes, or long enough to make them soft and pliable, make excellent low calorie wraps for just about anything. Next week, you’ll get more corn (I hope!) and peppers and the first of our garlic and red cabbage. Your fruit will likely be Yonder Farm’s peaches.

What’s new on the farm?

Organic sweet corn is not especially common in the markets largely because it’s a challenge to grow. Birds, insects, weeds, drought, demanding nutrient requirements – these all play a role. With the early crop, my greatest concern had been European corn borers. And with the later crop, I had been most concerned about corn earworms and fall armyworms. These are all caterpillars, and in corn country they are present in large numbers. But I am now most concerned about the little bandit faced mob that has swarmed our corn. Raccoons are not interested in any of the other vegetables we grow, but we are learning that they love sweet corn. They destroyed half of our first planting this week, and I’m now looking for ways to prevent them from doing the same to our second planting. Nearly the entire farm perimeter is fenced, doing absolutely nothing to prevent them from coming and going at will. They are excellent climbers. An electrified interior fence is an option, as is trapping and removal. In the meantime, we are short of corn. Small quantities of corn can still be useful in the kitchen. Victoria tells me that she’ll carve kernels off the cob directly over the top of a garden salad. We’ll do the same over tacos or bowls of beans and rice. Enjoy this corn starter, this small down payment, and know we’ll (try very hard to) have more corn in the future.

Have a great week, Ted      

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from Windflower Farm. We had 2 1/2 inches of rain last week, but at least it wasn’t the 5 inches that have fallen in neighboring counties. The weatherman reports that July was the third wettest on record. After two rain-free days, waves of light rainfall came this afternoon and it is now coming down hard.       

What’s in your share?

• Lettuce
• Fennel
• Tomatoes
• Cabbage
• Scallions
• Kale
• Squash or cukes

Fennel is this week’s new crop. It is perhaps best known as one of the ingredients in a roasted root medley. What can you do with it now? It’s an excellent addition to any summer salad used raw and sliced thin. At https://www.acouplecooks.com/fennel-recipes/ you’ll find ten fennel recipes, including a fennel orange salad. Our tomatoes are coming along well, in spite of the rain, and we expect to continue to send them in bags of mixed kinds and sizes for as long as they produce. Our corn will be ready next week, as will our peppers. And Martin, at Markristo Farm, tells me his organically grown yellow and green beans are also starting and that we should see them very soon.

Your fruit share will consist of our blueberries (probably on Tuesday) or Pete’s peaches (likely on Thursday). We are sending peaches to Central Brooklyn CSA this week. Like strawberries and raspberries, blueberries have to be harvested fully ripe: They won’t ripen after picking. With strawberries, it’s easy: we wait to pick until they are completely red. With most blueberries, they not only have to be fully blue, they have to be nearly black. We find them to be a challenge to harvest because the little bit of purple that indicates they are not yet ripe is very hard to see. With many varieties, a few tart berries are inevitable. In the weeks ahead, you can expect more stone fruit from Pete and melons from our farm and local farmer John Hand.

What’s new on the farm?

I spent a few hours this morning on my cultivating tractor trying to eliminate the weeds that are in our newest beds of greens and root crops. Weeds represent a substantial challenge for those of us who farm organically. It appears that there is no weather in which they don’t thrive. During last year’s dry season, they were formidable. They excel at colonizing newly disturbed environments like a freshly tilled garden and can do so with very little water. This year, because of the rain, they are also fierce, in part because it is often too wet to get into fields with my tractors to slow them down, and even then it seems that all we do is replant them.

Weeds are worth getting to know in the same way getting to know any adversary is worthwhile. Galinsoga, pigweed, purslane, lambsquarters, shepherd’s purse, ragweed, quack grass, crabgrass, field bindweed, Pennsylvania smartweed and chickweed represent our biggest foes. All but two are annuals. and only one is a winter annual, which means that most germinate and grow along with our vegetables, where they rob them of nutrients, water and sunlight. And they complete their life cycles in a fraction of the time our vegetables do, producing great numbers of seeds that produce next year’s competitors.

My cultivating tractor did a good job. On its belly, where I can see, it’s outfitted with a gang of German-made discs on parallelograms that are intended to eliminate weeds between rows. And on its rear it has locally made finger weeders designed to take care of the weeds within the row. After just a couple of hours the battery charge on the tractor was depleted (it’s a plug-in electric tractor). To enable me to continue on, my son Nate outfitted the tractor with a small Honda generator, turning the tractor into a hybrid. Now I can cultivate all day!

Have a good week, Ted