Tag: community food

Delivery #12, Week of August 18, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Cabbage
  • Arugula
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Tomatoes
  • Basil
  • Eggplant
  • Yellow onions
  • Green beans
  • Sweet corn

The fruit share will be more of Yonder Farm’s peaches.

If you ordered maple and grain shares for the August distribution, please pick them up this week. Please note, a few grain items will not be available this month. We will make these items up in October if possible. If you ordered grain this month, we will send you more details in a separate email. 

News from the farm

A Cornell extension agent has just left our farm. Our cucumbers have a disease and I’ve been stumped by it. I’m usually able to diagnose a vegetable plant disease after a few minutes with a dissecting scope, but not this time. I had dropped a note to Chuck, the agent, and to a Cornell University plant pathologist I know late last week and they decided our case was interesting enough to merit a lab analysis. Had it blown in from Canada or did it travel with the seed? Chuck had come to collect samples. Downy mildew of cucumbers had already taken out our field crop, which happens to most organic growers by the first week of August, and we suspected it was the culprit in the case of my greenhouse cucumbers. But the spots were the wrong color and the plants lacked any other telltale symptomatology, especially the dark fungal growth (sporangia) on the undersides of leaves. I was told to wrap some leaves in a wet paper towel and to reexamine them on Wednesday. I can’t wait.

A more likely contender is angular leaf spot, caused by a bacterium that can be seedborne. This fit because the spots were first detected on the cotyledons or seed leaves. A third contender, a nasty disease called scab, is also seedborne, and we’ve had it before. So, who knows? It’s my hope that incubating the pathogen in a petri dish will lead to a diagnosis. And perhaps to a plan for extending the cucumber season next year. I’ll keep you posted. In going down the list of diseases that can kill cucumbers, I’m happy that we can grow any at all.

It’s county fair week here in Washington County and the kids in the packing shed are bouncing off the wall today. (If I haven’t mentioned it: five teenagers from the neighborhood work here on Mondays and Wednesdays packing your vegetables. They’ll be going back to school soon.) The demolition derby is tonight and nearly all of them are going. Although none of them will be showing 4-H animals, several entered artwork and will find out tonight if they’ve won ribbons. The talk today was about tractor pulls, maple milkshakes and fried dough. It’s easily this agricultural county’s biggest happening all year, and I’m looking forward to going myself.   

Have a great week, Ted

Delivery #10, Week of August 4, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Sweet peppers
  • Summer squashes
  • Red onions
  • Magenta lettuce
  • Tomatoes
  • Basil
  • Sweet corn
  • Carrots from Denison Farm
  • The fruit share will consist of a pint of our own organically-grown blueberries.

As some of you know, we made a mathematical error recently that resulted in us sending fewer peaches than needed to a couple of CSA sites. Our sincere apologies to you if you missed yours. You will receive make-up peaches this week in addition to the blueberries in your regular share. 

News from the farm

I love sweet corn fresh off the plant and raw and eat quite a bit of it in the field. In this way it’s cool, crunchy and sweet. This first batch is running small because of the lack of rain, but it has most of the qualities that I’m after. So far, I’ve found very few bugs, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. A sweet corn tip: because insects get under the corn husk primarily by travelling down the silk channel, they are most often found feeding near the tip of the ear. The best way to deal with the potential problem of finding “worms” in your corn is to cut off about two inches of the ear tip before husking. There isn’t any corn worth eating at the tip anyway. The presence of these insects is difficult to detect, but a quick removal of the tip means you’ll never have to worry about it. Now, if you find a hole in the side of the husk, you are probably dealing with a corn borer, and that’s messier. We make every effort to feed those ears to the chickens, but the holes are sometimes hard to detect, and some will slip through. Insects are interesting, and if you are curious, peel the husk back and find out what’s going on inside.

We are harvesting our storage onions this week. Half the crop spent the week in windrows on the tops of their beds to kickstart the curing process. We’ll place these in crates and tuck them in the greenhouse to complete curing. Today, we are pulling the second half of the crop and will leave them in windrows for the next several days. Field drying like this shrinks the onion’s neck tissue and can stop or slow the spread of any disease from leaves to bulbs. The hailstorm that took place here three weeks ago mowed the tops off most of our onions. Unfortunately, they hadn’t quite attained their full size, but they are still good, and we are sending some of the red ones this week in bunched form.  

Have a great week, Ted

Delivery #7, Week of July 13, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Lettuce
  • Tomatoes
  • Basil
  • Kale OR Greens Mix (your choice)
  • Arugula
  • Cucumbers
  • Yellow onions
  • Zucchini/Squash

Everything in this week’s share was grown organically at Windflower Farm

Your fruit share will be a pint of our own organically grown blueberries

News from the farm

On Thursday afternoon of last week, we had an impromptu visit by officials from the US Department of Labor and a significant hailstorm, and we will be feeling the impacts of these for the next couple of weeks.

Lucky us, the DOL inspector told Jan that he intends to do a full 5-year audit of our farm’s labor practices. Many farmers can spend their entire careers without encountering a federal DOL official. He also told Janthat our farm worker housing was the nicest he’d ever seen, which I hope he remembers when he encounters the inevitable shortcomings in my paperwork.

Farm workers and farm raids by ICE have been much in the news lately. Daniel, the young man from Mexico you might have met if you encountered our delivery truck, told me about the worker abuses at a farm in New Jersey that employs many of his neighbors from Guanajuato, the most flagrant of which is that they take so many “payroll deductions” from their paychecks that they effectively get only 55% of what they are entitled to. They are getting just $10/hour when they should be getting nearly $18.00. Why don’t they make a complaint?, I wondered. Because there is no way to earn $700/week in Mexico, was the answer. And they are willing to work the 70 hours a week their New Jersey farmer requires of them to earn it. Make a complaint and the job vanishes. These are the people who grow our food. We cannot allow them to betreated that way.

When it comes to the details of the audit here, I’m not worried about a bad outcome: we work hard to do everything by the book. Still, it will take hours to get together the paperwork they’ve asked for. My goal is to have it done by Monday because I want time to prepare for the Department of Agriculture produce safety inspection that is coming up on Wednesday.

The hailstorm, the other thing that happened on Thursday, caused substantial damage. The wind-driven hailstones came straight out of the north, shredding leaves and blowing the plastic off a greenhouse. Fortunately, we grow most of your tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in tunnels, and some of your greens under cover. Most of the current crop of summer squashes and zucchinis were ruined, but more will come along soon. The young greens will recover, although this and next week’s greens will no doubt show some of the damage. The potatoes and squash and corn were all flattened, but I am confident that they’ll come back. We’ve experienced worse.

Best wishes, Ted

Delivery #5, Week of June 23, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

Reminder: there will be no delivery next week. We will resume CSA deliveries during the week of July 7th with delivery #6.

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Green oakleaf lettuce
  • Romaine lettuce
  • Purple kohlrabi
  • Red radishes
  • Summer squashes
  • Cucumbers
  • Napa cabbage or choy (from Dension Farm)
  • Red Russian kale
  • Garlic scapes
  • Onions

Lettuce and kale fare poorly in high temperatures. To preserve them, rinse them with cold water when you get home, spin or shake dry and store them cold.   

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

News from the farm

Warm season crops are beginning to come in with the arrival of summer and the season’s first heat wave. Cucumbers and squashes are starting, but quantities are limited. It’s my hope that when deliveries resume after the July Fourth weekend, we’ll have an abundance of both. One of our projects during the delivery hiatus is to transplant our second succession of these two vegetables. Experience has taught us that three or four plantings of squash, separated by a month or so, is sufficient to maintain a supply for the season. As one planting goes down, usually because of powdery mildew or another disease, the next kicks in.

Cucumbers are more difficult for us. They are susceptible to everything that infects squashes, and they are susceptible to downy mildew, which is virulent enough to cause a complete loss. New to this year’s crop plan is the addition of two varieties of cucumber with a degree of downy mildew resistance. Plant breeders have so far had success developing resistance in pickling varieties, adding two weeks to the harvest window. If all goes well, you’ll find these picklers in your shares later in the season.

Plans for the week include hand weeding the bare ground onions and herbs in what we’ve come to call the Woods Field, transplanting a block of sweet corn, seeding green and yellow wax beans, staking and trellising the sweet peppers, and buzzing all over the farm with our electric cultivators.

Other plans for the week ahead include moving Nate’s sheep to a new pasture, covering the blueberries with insect/bird netting and weeding the rest of the farm. And, time permitting, going paddling in the Adirondacks.

Be careful out there this week – it’s going to be hot!

Have a great Fourth of July, Ted

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!