Category: Shares

Delivery #3, Week of June 9, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Red or green lettuce
  • Hakurei (sweet white) turnips
  • Red Russian Kale
  • Mixed mustard greens
  • Bunched onions
  • Garlic scapes
  • And radishes

Japanese turnips can be sliced thin and used like radishes or sauteed until caramelized in olive oil and used as a side dish. They are sweeter and less turnip-like than the traditional fall varieties. Scapes can be pureed and used like garlic in its clove form.

The fruit share is a quart of Yonder Farm’s strawberries.

News from the farm

It continues to rain too much (more than 3 inches last week), but I’m not going to complain about it this week.

Black locusts have been in blossom this past week, which seems a little late to me and makes me wonder if the cool and wet spring has had anything to do with it. They have a sweet fragrance and an appearance resembling the white blooming horse chestnut, at least from a distance. Gardeners following the planting advice in the Farmers’ Almanac will tell you that the locust bloom indicates that it’s now safe to set out tomatoes and other frost sensitive vegetables. We planted our first tomatoes on April 25th, nearly six weeks ago, into the protected environment of a high tunnel (essentially a greenhouse without a heater) and they are now nearly shoulder high and full of small green fruits. In this cool year, tomatoes will be slow to start – look for them in CSA shares in about four weeks.

In early May, we also planted cucumbers, another frost sensitive vegetable, in a high tunnel. We conducted a trial of this last yearwith mixed results. The plants produced well at first, but they were invaded by striped cucumber beetles and went down prematurely due to a disease they carried. This year, we wrapped the entire tunnel with an insect screen and, although some beetles have found their way inside, the planting appears healthy and small fruits are getting their start. We have trained the cucumber vine to climb up a single trellis wire and they are now up to my waist. Small quantities of cucumbers should be in shares soon. Field cucumbers are about two weeks behind them.

Have a great week. Best wishes, Ted

PS. Windflower Farm hats are once again available for purchase. If you would like one or two hats, please preorder them here: Windflower Farm’s Hat Order Form. We’ll be closing the order form within the next couple of weeks and we’ll send them on the truck to your site a little later this summer. Stay tuned!

Delivery #2, Week of June 2, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from all of us at a still-wet Windflower Farm!

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • ‘Tropicana’ lettuce (green leaf) or red leaf lettuce
  • ‘Red Russian’ kale
  • ‘Prize’ bok choy
  • ‘Crunchy King’ radishes
  • Baby bunched red or yellow onions
  • Potted ‘Prospera Red’ basil 
  • News from the farm

On Friday of last week, in one spectacular day, three of our staff planted ‘Panisse’ and ‘Tropicana’ lettuce, ‘Red Russian’ kale, ‘Giant of Italy’ parsley and ‘Prospera’ basil, some 15,000 plants in all. And two more stellar employees, along with my son Nate, planted sweet potatoes, another 8,000 plants, or slips as they are called, making for a Windflower Farm one-day planting record. And then it rained, with nearly 3” falling before it was over.

There is much to be said for farming on high ground, and it is more than just the view. Our fields are usually quick to dry out. Still, runoff from a neighbor’s fields, which are even higher than ours, flowed between newly mulched beds of eggplants and chiles, producing nearly enough whitewater to kayak. Friends of ours who farm on both sides of the Tomhannock Creek had over 3” of rain and now cannot cross the ford to tend their crops on the far side of the creek. Weather, that fickle managing partner of our farm, has been particularly out of step with the plans we lesser partners have made for this season.

Next week, we expect to send purple kohlrabi, arugula, lettuce, kale, a mustard mix, radishes, and onions. Next to come from our fields will be cucumbers, squashes, garlic scapes and broccolini, but not until the weather becomes more of a team player.

Best wishes, Ted

Distribution No. 20, Week of October 14, 2024

The News from Windflower Farm

It’s winter share signup season! Please read below to learn more.

The last grain and maple shares will be sent this week. If you ordered an October grain and/or maple share, please be sure to pick them up. 

What’s in the share?

  • The last of our sweet peppers
  • Lettuce
  • Kale mix
  • Spinach or swiss chard (choice)
  • Sweet potatoes
  • A bagful of shallots and chiles
  • Pie pumpkin
  • Carrots
  • Broccoli or cauliflower (choice)

Your fruit share will be one or two of the new apple varieties growing at Yonder Farm, possibly ‘Snapdragon’ or ‘Ludicrisp’.

Coming next week: leeks, potatoes, Rosemary, carrots, Butternut squash, lettuce, purple kale, chiles, ginger and more sweet potatoes.

If you see Don, the man who drives our delivery truck with Daniel on Thursdays, wish him a happy birthday – he turned 75 last week!

What’s new on the farm?

The swirling deep rose and light blues of the Aurora Borealis dominated the night sky here late last week. I am told that the spectacle was the result of interactions between the sun’s solar winds and the earth’s magnetic field. With that, and a significant temperature cool down and two rainy days, the summer farm season seemed to give way to fall over the weekend. Freeze warnings sent us to the field with floating row covers to protect the tender greens and ginger we have yet to harvest. Seasonal deadlines have given some bounce to our step – with just three weeks remaining in the field season, there is much to do. We harvested all the remaining sweet peppers, chiles and eggplants yesterday. Just a few odd beds of leeks, potatoes and carrots remain to be harvested. In the days before, we took down all the tomato vines, producing a compost heap that is now larger than my house. Next, we’ll pick up pepper stakes, bundle the irrigation headers, and roll up the caterpillar tunnel plastic for use next year.

While I composted and shaped an acre or so of field beds for fall Allium plantings (garlic, onions, shallots and an experimental leek variety), Nate chisel plowed and applied compost to the tunnels where we’ll plant winter greens starting later today. On Wednesday, I’ll pick up 2,000 lbs. of rye and hairy vetch seed from friends at The Farm at Miller’s Crossing to sow on any remaining bare ground. In sections of the farm intended for the earliest spring 2025 plantings, we have shaped beds prior to cover cropping. In this way, just a shallow skim tilling will be needed ahead of next year’s earliest transplanting.

A winter share anyone?

Purchasing a winter share is your chance to extend the fruit and vegetable season through the New Year.

What is it? In a nutshell, the winter share consists of a total of three one-bushel boxes, one delivered every fourth Saturday from mid-November through early January (November 16th, December 14th, and January 11th). It contains a big bag of fresh greens (kale, spinach and more), 8-10 lb. of vegetables from our root cellar (including winter squashes, “Irish” and sweet potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, and other storage veggies), 4-6 lb. of delicious apples (and pears if available) from the Borden Farm, and a sweet treat every month (the Borden’s apple cider, Harry’s honey, and Deb’s jam). Optional grain, maple and egg shares are also available. Please follow the link for more details and to sign up.

Click here to learn more: Windflower Farm’s 2024-2025 Winter Share (wufoo.com).

We hope you’ll join us for the winter share season!

Take care, Ted

Distribution #19, Week of October 12, 2020

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

CBCSA Newsletter: August 17th Week A

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