Central Brooklyn CSA

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Tomatoes
• Peppers
• Eggplants
• Onions
• Sweet Corn
• Parsley
• Radicchio
• Kale or collards from Denison Farm
• Your fruit share will be Pennsylvania peaches complements of Yonder Farm.

Maple and grain shares will be delivered this week – don’t forget to check in!

News from the farm

A lush green is everywhere. Rose colored Joe Pye weed, purple loosestrife, boneset and cattails are in the wet places along roadways, and goldenrod is blooming. Cooler weather has set in with the arrival of August, perhaps a little prematurely. Rainfall is still regular, but it’s not unwelcome. August is typically a period of transition here: the salad greens that had become buggy or bitter in July are gone, and a new generation is coming along. Tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are at their peak, as is sweet corn, but we are focusing our farm work on later crops. We weeded our sweet potatoes for the last time. We are cultivating fall broccoli, kale, and cabbage, and beginning to harvest potatoes. And we are sowing our last successions of beets, summer squashes, radishes, turnips, lettuce, and spinach. After this week, there will be just ten weeks left in  the CSA season.

I travelled through the lake country of northwestern Connecticut last weekend to pick up a potato harvester. Our old harvester was a large, unruly contraption; the only thing reliable about it was that it would break down regularly. It consisted of hundreds of chains, dozens of sprockets and a bent pto shaft, and had to be tended by half a dozen people to make it function properly. Weeds, rocks, and potatoes would jam in any of a dozen nooks or crannies, causing the tractor to kick and sputter, eventually grinding the whole operation to a stop. The new machine, an Italian import, is made of far fewer parts. The Italians farm on stony soils, like ours, and have developed tools able to withstand harsh treatment. It doesn’t have a single chain. If the old machine moved along the field like a loud, angry mob, this new one sashays, moving down the potato bedin a rocking motion, a harvest dance, a fine piece of machinery. Perhaps Nate will post a video on Instagram. In the meantime, he’s posted three short farm pieces just this week.

Take care, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Tomatoes
• Sweet corn
• Red and yellow sweet peppers
• Yellow onions
• Cilantro
• Lettuce
• Bunched red beets
• Beans – yellow wax or green
• Chiles (jalapeno and/or hungarian hot wax)

The beans will benefit from cooking. And probably from some kind of seasoning. I don’t know why they are so tough. These are popular varieties because they are usually tender and flavorful. Is it the result of the alternating hot and cold and wet and dry conditions that have prevailed this summer? Or is it because nutrients have been washed out of the soil by the excessive rainfall? I don’t know.

Here is my doom and gloom paragraph – feel free to skip ahead. A wet week is in the offing, and that is not good news for our onions, which we are in the process of pulling and field curing, or for our potato harvest, which we’d like to start but cannot because of the wet. Much of the lettuce that has not bolted has melted in the dampness. We’ll have a gap next week. The chard has Cercospora, the kale is buggy, and our winter squash is still weedy and waterlogged. It’s been a tough year!

Not all is doom and gloom. The young lettuce appears to love this rain. As do the sweet corn, beets, peppers, eggplant, carrots, sweet potatoes, and the new kale and chard plantings. And, because we grow tomatoes under protective covers, they are happy, too!

Your fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s blueberries. Peaches will be coming next week. These have been procured for us by Pete at Yonder Farm, but they will come from the Pennsylvania farm of a friend of his.

News from the farm

Nate helped me pull the sprayer out of the barn on Friday. You’ve probably seen the kind of thing I’m talking about: it consists of a large white tank and a 21’ wide boom and sits on the rear of a tractor. Ours covers three beds. Flea beetle populations in our fall broccoli and cabbage had become out of control. Insecticides are, of course, off limits to organic farmers. No Chlorpyrifos here. No Diazinon or Malathion. But we do spray sometimes, and when we do, it may well be some unusual stuff.

Rain came in multiple waves on Friday, so we woke early on Saturday to spray. It took an hour to prepare the sprayer – it was our first time out this season. We had to install the PTO roller pump, clean and install the spray nozzles, and then test the thing. We mixed a brew consisting of three ingredients: one was a fermented soil dwelling bacterium called Spinosad, another was an extraction from the root of chrysanthemum called Pyganic, and the last was mineral oil. A full 60-gallon tank can cover just an acre of crops, but that is all there was to spray. And thank goodness – the stuff was expensive. A quart of Entrust (the Spinosad product) costs over $600.

I worry that many of us fall prey to snake oil salesmen. I’m often surprised by what I’m told people add to their fields to achieve a little magic. Few of the products marketed to organic farmers have undergone efficacy trialing. In our need to control pests we are hopeful that we can purchase a remedy at the store, but we might also be too gullible or desperate. Twenty four hours later, I could see that the concoction we applied was effective. I didn’t see more than a handful of flea beetles in the entire field. The day before there were nearly that many on each plant. Thank goodness for a little snake oil!  

Have a great week, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Tomatoes
• Basil
• Eggplant
• Sweet corn
• Kale
• Green Romaine lettuce or Green Oakleaf lettuce
• Bunched beets
• Squash

Your fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s blueberries

To stay ahead of downy mildew, we are growing basil in pots this year. We grow ‘Prospera’, a mildew resistant variety of basil, but that seems to give the plant little more than an additional week or two in the field. If you have a sunny window and a green thumb, you can keep the plant going for a while, plucking the leaves a little at a time. If not, you can use the whole plant in one shot now and toss out the soil cube. We’ll send more.

News from the farm

Flea beetles and woodchucks vie for the title of most damaging pest of Windflower Farm vegetables. They both love cabbage, broccoli, and kale, and it’s a wonder that we have any of these at all. Woodchucks also love lettuce, sweet potato vines, and squashes, and flea beetles are nuts over arugula. Like Mr. McGregor, we spend much of our time standing sentry and erecting barriers. But another four-legged creature, a little bandit, is occasionally in the running for biggest pest, and it’s about time for it to make an appearance.

If you’ve been with us for the past couple of years, you’ll know that the racoons in our neighborhood have a fondness for our sweet corn. They seem to know when it’s ready for harvest and sweep through the night before and take half of our crop. This year, we have taken extraordinary steps to keep them away, the most important of which is double electric fencing. The entire farm is enclosed within an 8-foot-tall box wire fence primarily meant to keep deer out. But racoons are excellent climbers and surely consider this nothing more than a small inconvenience.

Inside of this fence, our corn is surrounded by an 18- to 36-inch-tall woven electric fence of the kind meant to keep woodchucks and rabbits out of a garden. To touch this fence is to get an electrical shock designed to make you think twice before touching it again. And outside of this barrier is another electric fence – this one a two-strand electric fence of the sort used to keep livestock as large as sheep or cattle in a paddock. We’ve used everything short of razor wire to create what we think is an impenetrable barrier. But racoons are crafty. They are no doubt in a strategy meeting as I write. I expect a sleepless night – we plan to harvest tomorrow morning and I should find my spotlight and be standing vigil tonight.  

Have a great week, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Zucchini or summer squash
• Kale or Choy (choice)
• Yellow wax beans
• Yellow onions
• Fennel
• Lettuce
• Tomatoes
• Cabbage or Radicchio or Sweet Peppers (choice)

Your fruit share will be blueberries from Yonder Farm

Beans, peppers and eggplants are beginning to come in, tomatoes and squashes are yielding well, and sweet corn is just around the corner… it must be summer in the Upper Hudson Valley.

News from the farm

Another inch and three quarters of rain fell since I last wrote, but most of that was early in the week, and a drying out has already begun. Sunshine is expected for the next few days. We took advantage of our first opportunity to get tractors in the fields to fling compost and shape beds on Thursday, and by Friday we had transplanted lettuce, kale, choy and chard and direct-seeded spinach, cilantro, and green beans. My outlook is a little brighter today.

A soil health tour came through here mid-week. My role was to describe our cover cropping and composting. Turnout was good, but the lack of complication in our cover cropping might have been a disappointment to some in attendance. In spring, we use oats and peas, and in fall, we use rye and hairy vetch. Both blends add nitrogen and organic matter to the soil, improve soil tilth, reduce erosion, and suppress weeds. That’s all there is to it, off to the next farm. In my experience, simple is best. Perhaps, in some future where we have more land than we need for vegetables, and more time to sort things through, we’ll add complexity. 

It’s steamy hot this morning. Hobbes the cat is playing dead again, legs splayed and undignified (Jan tells me he’s “splooting”). I slow down enough to confirm that he is still breathing and then head to our onion cleaning setup, where Jan, Nate and I will prepare some onions for shipping to our friends at Denison Farm. They represent our side of a trade that will provide carrots for you a little later in the season. In this weather, farmers have had unexpected successes and failures, and swaps make sense.

Have a great week, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Tendersweet cabbage
• Fennel
• Red onions
• Swiss chard
• Beets
• Dill
• Zucchini or summer squash
• Tomatoes

The tomatoes are coming in well now. We should be starting sweet peppers next week, and I think that we’ll be back into lettuce next week, too. But downy mildew has struck, and the cucumber harvest will grind to a standstill soon.

The fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s peaches.

News from the farm

Water, water everywhere. We’ve had 15” of rain since the beginning of June, more than half of it since the beginning of July. Last year, we had about 4” in the same period. Ponds, creeks, and rivers everywhere are swollen and brown with runoff. Lake Champlain has risen an incredible 26” in the last two weeks. Our barnyard is all puddles. Our fields are all mud, with standing water in low places.

We need several days of drying out or we’ll begin to experience losses. So far, we have lost our garlic crop and we will till under plantings of spinach and arugula because we have not been able to cultivate them. I worry about our winter squashes, and our cucumbers are on the way out because the storms have brought spores of the fungus causing downy mildew northward from its overwintering grounds in the Mid-Atlantic. Succession plantings have been delayed. Our greenhouse has a backlog of lettuce, broccoli, squash, and cabbage.

Vegetable growers’ listservs have lit up with questions about disease management in a very wet season. One wonders, for example, if there is a fungicide approved under USDA’s organic farming rules that is actually effective against downy mildew of cucumber or basil? Or against early blight or Septoria of tomato? Answers: No and no. Organic disease management is all about variety selection and pre-planting cultural considerations.      

Small farms are fragile. The limited financial reserves most small-scale farmers have leave them especially vulnerable. I am reminded of how grateful I am for the CSA model and your willingness to share in our risk every time I think of our own exposure. I’ve been hearing that several of the Vermont farms that were hit by last week’s intense rainfall are on the brink of insolvency. Just as they were about to market their crops and begin to repay their operating loans, their crops were lost to flooding.  

Farming is a risky business, and weeds, diseases, and insect infestations are just a beginning. Having little control over the environment in which we work is especially challenging during seasons with extreme weather. Most of us struggle in the high heat and humidity, naturally dislike extended periods of work in the rain, and cannot work in the mud. Prolonged rainfall prevents us from making timely plantings and makes effective weed control nearly impossible.

So, we’re struggling. But I don’t want to close on an entirely gloomy note. We have a fair amount of high ground, and potatoes, summer squashes, peppers, eggplants, sweet corn, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, leeks, beets, and a variety of leafy greens look good. Good things will continue to come along. But the Dutch may have it right: we may have to work toward a future where we grow everything under cover.

Have a good week, Ted