Central Brooklyn CSA

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Carrots
• Potatoes
• Rosemary
• Peppers
• Summer squashes
• Tomatoes
• Oakleaf lettuce
• Pumpkins
• Mixed mustard greens

Your fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s ‘Gala’ apples.

These are likely the last of our tomatoes. Next week, you’ll get Swiss chard, arugula, carrots, potatoes, leeks, sweet peppers and the first sweet potatoes of the season.

News from the farm

As the days become shorter and the mornings colder, there is renewed urgency in our work. We expect overnight temperatures in the low 40s this week. I was surprised this morning to see so much orange and yellow in the sugar maples across the front lawn. Reds are popping out on the hillsides. The farm season will soon be over, and there is still much to do: there are fall crops to harvest, a winter share to prepare for, and a farm to clean up.

This is how we’ll occupy ourselves over the next five weeks. We should wrap up strawberry planting this week. Sweet potato and “Irish” potato harvests are nearing their mid-points and we should complete them by mid-October. Tomatoes are winding down and we’ve begun to remove plants that have run their course. We hope to remove all the tomato vines and peppers from our caterpillar tunnels and greenhouses and winterize them by the end of October. We’ve seeded winter greens (kales, Swiss chard, tatsoi and spinach) and should plant them into the beds vacated by summer vegetables in the next couple of weeks. The over-wintering onions have also been seeded, and we’ll plant them, along with Bob’s garlic, into newly composted beds once the winter greens are in. We will continue to plant cover crops as fields become emptied of their vegetable crops, a project we’ll wrap up by late October. Field clean-up is well underway: irrigation supply lines are being bundled and labelled, drip tape is being spooled for reuse next year, row covers are being balled up and marked for their next best uses, and mulch is being picked up. Our goal is to have the farm ready for the winter by the time we make our last deliveries at the end of October.

Winter share information will come in the next News from the Farm.

Have a great week, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Green beans
• Lettuce
• Spinach
• Summer squash
• Tomatoes
• Sweet peppers
• Butternut squash
• Chiles

Your fruit share will be a mix of Yonder Farms’ ‘Zeststar’ and ‘Golden Supreme’ apples.

News from the farm

We harvested just four 20-bushel totes of winter squash. There are perhaps two more in the field. If we include pie pumpkins, this harvest might provide shares for two weeks. Disappointing. Last year, we harvested 320 bushels from a similar sized planting. The side-by-side fields we chose had low spots at their centers, and the rainy summer resulted in standing water that never subsided. We’ll send them all right away. And then, in this upside-down season, we’ll resume sending summer squash. Janthinks the winter squash might best be used as additions to things: added to chili or to tacos, for example, or included in a medley of root vegetables. She says to use them right away – they won’t keep. I think you may also need to be liberal with brown sugar.   

In better news, we began harvesting sweet potatoes on Thursday and they look good. They’re pretty, good-sized, and richly colored. We’ll begin the curing process rightaway – eighty degrees and 100 percent humidity for ten days – which helps their starches turn into sugars. The Ag & Markets food safety team came to inspect our farm last Thursday, and we spent most of our time talking about how to grow good sweet potatoes in the Northeast. We passed the inspection with an ‘A’, by the way. Kristoffer made the observation that if they had witnessed shortcomings related to our food handling protocols, we wouldn’t have talked much about sweet potatoes.

You would not guess how my new delivery truck got its first dent. There are so many ways a truck might get a dent in the city, but this one was unexpected. Don and Daniel were driving along Bergen Street in Brooklyn, moving slowly because of someone on a bicycle ahead of them. This made the driver of the car behind them furious. He honkedhis horn, he waved his hands, gesticulating exactly how you might imagine. And then, at the light at the end of the block, he charged out of his car and pounded his fist on the door of the truck. He was a big man and it scared the hell out of Don and Daniel. And it left a fist-sized dent in the middle of the driver’s side door. Oh, brother!

It seems to have happened quickly – we are in the season’s final quarter. Summer vegetables are winding down. Soon, our eggplants, peppers and tomatoes will give out. We have already begun to rip out some of the underperformers. At the first sign of cold, our summer squash will also be done. The same for beans and corn. But greens and the roots, bulbs and tubers of fall are still ahead. Next week, we’ll send lettuce, kale, potatoes, Rosemary, carrots, onions, and squashes of some sort.

Have a great week! 

Ted

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