Central Brooklyn CSA

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• Lettuce (Romaine and/or Green Oakleaf)
• Dill
• Kale
• Kohlrabi
• Fennel
• Cucumbers
• Zucchini and/or summer squash
• Tomatoes

The fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s peaches. Our blueberries are just about to start.

News from the farm

The tomatoes are beginning to ripen here. Nova (orange) and Red Pearl, two varieties of grape tomato, ‘Rebelski, a red beefsteak, and Gin Fizz, a large yellow-orange tomato, are starting us off, along with smaller quantities of Cherokee Purple. All of these were seeded in mid-March, potted on in mid-April, transplanted to high tunnels in the second week of May, and then weeded, trellised, irrigated, and trellised again between mid-May and now. It’s time to realize the fruits of our labor. Just add mozzarella, pesto, and a little slice of toast.

Rain has just begun to fall. On the weather map, the storm appears to extend from North Carolina to just north of Albany. The forecast calls for rain to last into tomorrow afternoon and to deliver 3-5” before it’s over. Nate and I have come inside. Nate was mowing blueberry pathways; I was mowing down old crop debris and weeds. I chose not to do any tillage work today because I was afraid it might result in soil erosion. Nate has dashed outside to put sandbags on the fragile road to our back fields to divert water and prevent a washout.  Salvador and company have opted to stay out in the rain to finish harvesting lettuce. I suggested tomato trellising or seeding in the greenhouse, but Salvador was determined. Their rain gear is the heavy-duty stuff from Helly Hanson, and it should keep them dry. Candelaria looked doubtful.

I’m fond of most things containing zucchini, including muffins, cookies, and sautés. I’m snacking on toasted zucchini bread as I write this. And right now, Jan is spiralizing zucchini in the kitchen. It took her a minute to get the result she wanted, but now she is making long noodles. She might serve it raw and cold on this hot day, but she’s also going to lightly sauté some of it on the stovetop with a little garlic and olive oil. She’ll eventually add spaghetti sauce, veggie meatballs and parmesan. Garlic bread and an arugula salad round out the meal. Jan, who dislikes most pasta, believes she has found her alternative, and it’s a healthy one.

An inch of rain has fallen in the first hour of the storm. A flash flood warning pops up on my phone. Salvador and his boys are bringing the tractor and wagon into the farmyard, crates of lettuce stacked high. Candelaria is walking behind them, smiling, as always, and relieved, I imagine, to be done for the day.

Have a great week, Ted 

The News from Windflower Farm

What you’ll get this week

• ‘Nancy’ green butterhead lettuce
• ‘Rouxai’ red oakleaf lettuce
• Arugula
• ‘French Breakfast’ radishes
• Yellow onions
• Kale
• Cucumbers (lots!)
• Zucchini or summer squash (lots!)

The fruit share will again be Yonder Farm’s strawberries. I had hoped for cherries, but the three inches of rain that fell in the Hudson Valley last week caused them to split. Blueberries will be ripening soon, and Iexpect to send them next week.

News from the farm

We missed a cultivation in the first and second successions of sweet corn because of the rain and mud, so Nate and I hoed it by hand today. Each row is 400’ long, which felt too long in the day’s heat. Placing waterjugs at each end of the planting would have made better sense than what I did, which was to leave one jug back at the beginning of the row. We used stirrup hoes, which are comprised of thin blades that slice through weeds just below the soil surface and look, as you can imagine, just like stirrups. Our soil is stoney, and the openness of the stirrup allows stones to pass through, minimizing our effort. The blades are mounted on a bracket that allows them to oscillate. Back and forth, push then pull. I walk backwards down the row, which uses lower back muscles and biceps primarily, pulling the blade through the weeds, then pushing back through the soil and pulling again, making for three passes and an effective weed kill. When I get tired, I turn around and push the hoe, using triceps and stomach muscles. It’s an excellent core workout. There are 16 rows in these two successions, which is why we try to time our tractor cultivations to avoid this kind of work.  

From the high ground where we were hoeing corn, we could see three young guys windrowing red onions. Two of the guys will be high school seniors in the fall and, when they are here, work almost exclusively in the packing shed. Their daylong stint in the field gave them a very different sense of work on the farm. Hot, sometimes buggy, sometimes back-breaking, often dirty work. Some of us love that stuff, others can’t get out of the field soon enough. The ‘Desert Sunrise’ onion variety that we planted last fall have sized up and their tops have gone down, signaling that it is time to harvest. The first step in the process is to pull them out of the earth, shake the soil out of their roots, and then to lay them in rows to dry. We are pleased with their size and color. We’ll snip tops and roots and bring them into the greenhouse before the next rain. These are not keepers, so they’ll be in shares soon.

We could also see Salvador and Candelaria and their boys in the field below the onions. They were taking covers off the peppers, eggplants, chiles and melons. This is the diminishing handful of crops we grow on black plastic mulch and under low wire hoops and fabric row covers. After a cold, windy and dry start to their lives in the field, we are happy to see how healthy the plants look. Salvador decided to abandon planting corn today. While it is hot and sunny, we have had quite a bit of rain in recent days, and the side hill where they were going to plant is too muddy. From there, they will be off to a planting of storage onions. We’ve never been able to escape at least some hand weeding in bare ground onions, and in this wet stretch, the weeds have outpaced our best effort. This is a tradeoff for us. If our onions were on black plastic mulch, we wouldn’t have this weeding chore, but we’d have plastic to throw away.

That’s all for now. Have a great week, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

I’d like to wish everyone a happy Fourth of July in advance of the holiday.

What you’ll get this week

• Red butterhead lettuce
• Green or red oakleaf lettuce
• Arugula
• ‘Joi Choy’
• ‘French Breakfast’ radishes
• Garlic scapes (8)
• ‘Boro’ beets
• Cucumbers
• Summer squash or zucchini

The fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s strawberries and rhubarb.

News from the farm

I’ve escaped chores for the past two days, so, today, it was my turn to clean the outhouses and water plants.

It’s been a rainy Saturday ahead of what is expected to be a wet week. After a walk around the farm to produce the week’s harvest and to-do lists (string tomatoes and peppers and weed, weed, weed!), I’ve headed into the workshop. Four small projects are on deck. The first is to make more of our mini pallets (under the new Food Safety Modernization Act, crates brought from the field to the packing shed may never touch the floor), the second is to make a tractor mount for an old basket weeder we’ve had laying around, the third is to install a solar battery charger on the roof of a cultivating tractor, and the fourth is to clear my things out of the shop – the tomato harvest will soon require that space! All are rainy weather projects. I think that Nate will help me.

Basket weeders are old-school weeding technology dating to the 1940s, before the widespread adoption of herbicides. They were designed for direct-seeded vegetables like carrots and beets and only continue to be used by organic growers. Picture a five-foot-long axle on which five rolling baskets that look like hamster cages are mounted. Now picture two such axles arranged in parallel so that eachbasket on the front axle has a partner aligned directly behind it. The axles are linked by a chain and sprockets, and the whole apparatus is held together by means of a simple frame. Both baskets roll across the ground, but the rear one rotates a bit more slowly than the one in front because its drive sprocket is larger. As a result, the rear basket effectively skids across the ground, thereby uprooting any little weeds in its path. There are gaps between the five pairs of baskets, so that the four rows of vegetables are left unmolested. There was a time when virtually every vegetable farm in America had one of these, but now most are rusting in their hedgerows.

Today’s rain has moved off to the north and east, the sun has set, and a crescent moon and stars can be seen to the west. The big dipper has just emerged from behind remnant clouds. The crickets are noisy, and the fireflies fill the back lawn with their blinking lights, some shooting straight up and into the night sky like so many comets. I checked the rain gauge: 9/10 inches. No need to irrigate this week.Instead, we’ll work in the tunnels, catching up on our tomato stringing and pepper trellising.

Have a great week, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

It’s grain and maple share week! If you’ve ordered either, be sure to get them.

Rain has come, and sunshine and heat are coming. Finally, the arrival of summer. Cucumbers, zucchini and yellow squashes are starting, and at least one of them will make it to you this week.

What you’ll get this week

• Green butterhead lettuce, a variety called ‘Nancy’
• Bok Choy
• Kohlrabi
• Hakurei turnips, a sweet Japanese variety
• Mixed kales
• Garlic scapes (5)
• Cucumbers or summer squash

The fruit share will be our own organically grown strawberries along with Yonder Farm’s rhubarb.

News from the farm

Young Charlie walked in the door just before 8:00 this morning. You could hear him coming all the way from his house in his well-used Ford pickup. It was music to my ears. School is out for the summer, and it’s his first day at work. Charlie’s presence makes it possible for both Nate and me to be out on the farm today, Nate to cultivate and me to prepare beds for the next plantings of sweet corn, lettuce, cabbage, and other odds and ends.

Nate is juggling three tractors today. He’s using the John Deere 5425 and a Checchi-Magli hilling set in sweet corn, potatoes and leeks. He’s got the Duos (small discs) on the G tractor. They are for the direct seeded crops that have just emerged along with a flush of new weeds. And he’s got the Steketees (a collection of five sweeps) set up on the electric blue tractor. It’s for onions, beets, greens, and herbs. His goal is to get through the whole farm every week or two.   

Charlie is a high schooler from next door and in his second season with us. His sister worked for us for a couple of summers, and now, unbelievably, she has graduated from college and is already a nurse on her way to becoming a physician’s assistant. His little brother Brady will join us beginning next week. And I hope that Ezden and Kaitlin, kids from two other nearby families, will also be joining us shortly. If the moms or dads in the neighborhood want to know where their kids are, they might start here.

It’s safe now to remove the covers from our collards, cabbages, broccoli and even our bok choy. The flea beetles that the covers are intended to protect these crops from prefer younger, more tender plants like arugula. When we first put the covers on the beds, the plants are small, and the cover lies nearly flat on the ground. Over time, the developing crop pushes the cover up, sometimes, quite high. It was our hope today that what was pushing the covers up was all crop, but we were met with a surprise: a mix of pigweed, lambsquarters, lady’s purse, Galinsoga, and a few other invaders. And so there will be some hands-and-knees weeding, which is not our favorite way to deal with weeds, but it’s OK. The rain has made it easy to pull weeds, the weather is comfortable, and we have a full crew, the many hands that will make light work of the project. 

Have a great week, Ted

The News from Windflower Farm

It rained! A total of an inch of rain fell over the course of three or four days last week, giving the irrigation team a chance to turn their attention to cultivation. Our two electric cultivating tractors have seen a fair amount of action so far this spring, and things don’t look bad. One is set up to tackle the weeds in direct-seeded crops like radishes, beets, and arugula. The other is set up for transplants – thelettuces, kales and cabbages in our crop mix. A third electric tractor is in the final stages of its build. We haven’t committed it to a function yet. We might use it to seed or to spray or to weed something specific, such as the pathways between mulched beds or hilled crops like potatoes, leeks and corn. Or we might turn it into a transplanter. If we are to realize the goal of reducing diesel fuel consumption on the farm, we should probably focus on transplanting – our biggest user of fuel.    

What you’ll get this week

• Yellow onions, bunched
• Green oakleaf lettuce
• Bok Choy
• Red radishes, bunched
• Garlic Scapes
• Mixed kales, bunched
• Chard, bunched
• The fruit share will be strawberries from Yonder Farm.

News from the farm

Last week, we were asked how we deal with waste. Like most businesses, we generate too much of it. It’s a big topic, but plastics clearly top the list. Here are a few things we’ve been doing to address waste on our farm. We use the three Rs, of course. In the Reduce category,we have been working to eliminate our use of black plastic mulch – a standard in vegetable farming. We have eliminated mulch in all but our first Cucurbits, our few field-grown Nightshades, and our sweet potatoes. Next year, we’ll focus on alternatives to plastics in sweet potatoes. In our return to tubs at most of our sites, we’ve significantly reduced our use of boxes and plastic inserts. When we’ve purchased compost, we’ve transitioned from small plastic compost bags to durable supersacks (1 sack equals 40 bags). Beyond plastics, it was a pleasant surprise to find that our new delivery truck uses perhaps 20 percent less diesel than our old one. And in our transition to more and more drip irrigation, we’ve significantly reduced our water consumption (but we’ve used more drip tape).

In the Reuse category, we have been using much of last year’s drip tape again this year, thanks to a small retrieval tool made by Nate. We’ve also reused most of last year’s row cover, and all of last year’s tubs. And we’ve reused the plastic on many of our greenhouses for so long that there is a risk of some of it blowing off in the next wind. We Recycle, too, of course. Spent boxes, for example, go to thetransfer station (although I have no idea what becomes of them afterwards). Spent pallets become the fuel that heats our winter workshop. And vegetable waste is recycled by composting it first, and then spreading it on the farm. We still have work to do, but we’re working on it!

Have a great week, Ted