Category: Shares

The News from Windflower Farm

This week’s share

• ‘Covington’ sweet potatoes
• Red and yellow onions
• ‘Romance’ carrots
• ‘Bouquet’ dill
• Sweet peppers, mostly ‘Carmen’ 
• Butterhead lettuce
• ‘Kalebration’ mixed kale
• Arugula
• ‘Fordhook’ Swiss chard

Your fruit share will be ‘Fortune’ apples (‘Empire’ crossed with ‘Northern Spy’) and ‘Bosc’ pears from Yonder Farm.

I’m imagining tacos de camotes – thickly sliced slabs (or cubes) of roasted sweet potatoes, black beans, avocados, and onions placed in a hard corn taco, with my favorite Mexican sauce drizzled over everything and topped with fresh greens. You’ll find a dozen recipes online. 

What’s new on the farm?

Sweet potatoes are not difficult to prepare. Roast at 400 degrees in a pan with parchment paper until they begin to ooze their caramelized sugars and take on a bronzing around the edges, then serve. If cured properly, they won’t need anything. (Jan, who looks for any excuse to pull out the maple syrup, will tell you that a spoonful never hurts.) For fans of butternut squash soup, sweet potato soup is an excellent alternative. For the more adventurous, sweet potato lasagna is out of this world. 

This week’s batch of sweet potatoes is the first to come out of our makeshift curing room. When harvested, sweet potatoes are all starch. But a week to ten days at 80 degrees turns those starches to sugar. It’s not unlike what a week in the Carribean might do for any of us after a long winter. Connor, who is new on the farm this year, came to us after his Peace Corps work in Ghana was interrupted by the pandemic. His aunt MaryJane owns some of the land that we use to grow your crops. He tells me that the weather in Ghana permits in-ground curing of the roots. In our case, we cordon off a corner of a greenhouse with a heater, turn the temperature up, flood the floor so as to achieve a humidity of nearly 100%, and wait for ten days. That’s usually all there is to it. You can ensure that curing is complete by letting them sit on your counter for another week.   

Our sweet potatoes started their lives in North Carolina. Farmers there plant full size sweet potatoes in the field in early spring and then harvest “slips” – the little sprouts that emerge from the roots – and either plant them or sell them to other farmers for planting. My friend Tim, who grew 24 acres this year, drives his box truck all the way to North Carolina every spring to get the best slips, and he brings ours, too. His farm is called Laughing Child Farm, named for his four happy daughters, and on it he produces nothing but sweet potatoes. I admire the simplicity of his business, but I don’t envy it. Nate and I washed and sorted 80 bushels of sweet potatoes today (the yield from three 375’ beds), which I think will be enough for this week’s CSA deliveries, and I would have been done in by the tedium if it wasn’t for the excellent Sunday lineup on our public radio station (Le Show, Splendid Table, Afropop Worldwide and Freakonomics Radio). I prefer the challenge of the wide variety of crops we grow for the CSA.

Winter share information and a signup form should be available next week.  

Have a great week, Ted

It’s a Week A Pick up This Thursday, August 17th!

This week’s share:

• Tomatoes
• ‘Genovese’ Basil
• ‘Magenta’ Lettuce
• Garlic
• Yellow Onions
• Bi-Color Sweet Corn
• Green Snap Beans (Still Hand Picked!)
• Your Choice of Kale or Spinach
• Your Choice Between ‘Carumba’ Cabbage, ‘Zephyr’ Summer Squash, Sweet Peppers, or Eggplant.
• Your Fruit: Peaches!!!

Potatoes are coming soon. Melons are just around the corner.

The next Lewis Waite Delivery is August 31st. Did you know that you can place an order and edit it up to a few days before delivery? Helpful advice for those who sometimes forget to order until it’s too late (I know I have).

CSA News from Windflower

Farm Delivery #11, August 15 and 17, 2017
I’ve discovered podcasts! Sure, you’ve been listening to podcasts for years, but, as some of you know, good internet service is only just arriving in rural places, including here in Upstate New York. I’m finding all kinds of good stuff: a new favorite is Invisabilia, where two women explore the hidden forces behind why we behave the way we do. A little more to the point of this newsletter is the Farmer to Farmer podcast by Iowa farmer Chris Blanchard, who interviews small-scale organic farmers (and others) from all over North America. In one recent episode, Chris spoke with Simon Huntley, a software engineer whose company, Small Farm Central, hosts the online CSA sign-ups of more than a thousand CSAs. He has gathered all kinds of data related to CSAs and shareholder experiences and has a good deal to say about why some succeed and others fail. I think he is every bit as invested as we are in seeing the CSA movement grow, and to do that, he says, it (we) must learn new ways to better meet the needs and wishes of CSA members.

The few subjects he believes farmers should pay particular attention to are food value, farm communication, food choices and authenticity. (In last week’s New Yorker piece about the singer Lorde, I learned that it is “smoldering authenticity,” in particular, that people are after!) Choice is something I hope we can improve upon. You may have noticed that this week’s share entails choices among more than just the greens. Inspired by Simon’s comments, beyond deciding between spinach and kale, you’ll be asked to choose between cabbages, squashes, eggplants and peppers. If we find that giving you options like this is popular, and doesn’t create too many difficulties, we’ll do it more often over the second half of the season. Please, let me know what you think (tedblomgren@gmail.com).

Have a great week, Ted