Tag: Crown Heights

Thanksgiving Share, November 22, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

Thank you for purchasing one of our (abbreviated) winter CSA shares. We’ve been working all week to get it ready. It will arrive this Saturday, November 22nd, in a 1-bushel recyclable box. Come prepared – it will be relatively heavy. And please arrive on time – the volunteers that staff the site will have other things to do with the rest of their Saturday. They will be donating any leftover boxes to needy households in the neighborhood. Please read the important information at the end of this email for details about your pick-up location and distribution window. 

What’s in the share?

  • Lacinato and Red Russian kales and Romaine lettuce
  • Beets and kohlrabi
  • Carrots (from Denison Farm)
  • Sweet potatoes and “Irish” potatoes
  • Yellow and red onions, shallots and garlic (some boxes will have extra shallots instead of garlic)
  • Delicata squash
  • Butternut squash (from Denison Farm)
  • Rosemary
  • ‘Crimson Crisp’ (the smaller, darker red) and ‘Ludicrisp’ apples (from Yonder Farm)
  • Apple cider (from Borden Farm)

News from the farm

Tomorrow morning, while we are harvesting your greens, Comfort Food Community, an organization that feeds families in need in our rural community, will be coming here to harvest greens for their own Thanksgiving boxes which are slated to go out this week and next. Last week, this group harvested hundreds of bunches of kale from our greenhouses and this week they’ll harvest bok choy, lettuce and even more kale. Some 40% of the food we produce in this country is wasted. These folks work on area farms as gleaners to feed hungry people by harvesting, packing and distributing food that might otherwise be wasted. Of course, ours is not the only farm where they work. Their harvest van can be found in fields throughout the area, with a roster of 70 partnering farms so far. CFC and its cadre of volunteer harvesters have distributed over 1 million pounds of food since 2024.

When friends at Denison Farm, the producers of the carrots and butternut squashes in your share, learned of the devastation in Jamaica from Hurricane Melissa, the Category 5 storm that ripped through the country on October 28th, they set up a GoFundMe page to help the four men from Jamaica who work for them. Like Windflower Farm, their farm is a CSA, and their membership contributed an astonishing $20,000 to help these men and their families buy the supplies needed to rebuild their homes. Errol, Walter, Tyrone and Marlon will have a lot of work to do when they get home, but this will provide an essential boost to their effort. Bad news comes at us every day of the week. I share these two stories because they remind me of the good that also goes on every day, some of it in our own backyards.

Wishing you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving and a peaceful holiday season,

Ted and the entire Windflower Farm Team

Your share will be delivered on Saturday, November 22nd. Your pick-up time and location are noted below:

Central Brooklyn CSA (1251 Dean St., 4:30 to 6:00)

Please note:

1.       A friend, family member or neighbor can pick up your share for you if you are not able to make it to distribution. Please ask this person to sign-in under your name.

2.       Site hosts are not obliged to save shares for members who miss the distribution window. Any shares leftover after distribution will be donated to community fridges or food pantries and will help other community members in need.

3.       The farm is not able to send you a make-up share if you miss a distribution. The farm will only send shares to your pick-up site on the scheduled pick-up dates.

4.     We will send you a newsletter a day or two before distribution. Please save these two emails to your preferred contacts list: windflowercsa@gmail.com and tedblomgren@gmail.com and check your SPAM folder if our newsletter does not make it into your inbox.

5.       Watch for updates from site hosts on social media. Many sites post updates about the share on Instagram and Facebook.

Delivery 22, Week of October 28, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the share?

  • Lacinato kale
  • Cabbage (pointy or round green)
  • Kohlrabi
  • Sweet potatoes
  • “Irish” potatoes
  • Yellow onions
  • Swiss Chard
  • Bok Choy
  • “Seconds” Garlic and shallots (please use the garlic soon, it won’t keep)
  • Butternut squash (from Denison Farm)

Your fruit share will be Crimson Crisp apples from Yonder Farm.

News from the farm

This evening, after the harvest and just before dark, three of us headed out to seed down still more cover crops, each in our own old John Deere. The seeding window will close in mid-November and we are feeling some urgency to get these final beds covered. My job was to till under the newly harvested beds of broccoli, kohlrabi, and various greens and herbs, Nate’s was to spread his mixture of cereal and leguminous seeds using his whirlybird, and my brother’s task was to follow him with the cultipacker, the roller that ensures a good seed to soil contact. Colors in the hedgerows framing these fields were the last of fall – all burnt oranges and yellows.  

The harvest has been wrapped up, the farm has been cleaned up (mostly), the Alliums are all planted and covered, and the sheep have been shorn and relocated to their winter home. The to-do list is becoming smaller as our 26th season comes to a close.

Winter plans are coming together for the farm team. Salvador and Candelaria will leave for Tennessee to visit their kids at the end of the week, and Daniel and Liz, who last week received the happy news that Liz’s green card application had been approved, will help us with the barn roof and the Thanksgiving share before heading to Mexico for the winter. Andrea and Jason will redouble the effort to find a farm of their own. Kage will turn to his list of home renovations. Nate and I have equipment to work on and are considering some winter travelling, and Jan will be felting with the wool from Nate’s sheep and has backlog of farm finances to catch up on.

This week’s share is the last of the season. Four important housekeeping items before signing off. First, you’ll find a link to our survey page here: 2025 CSA SURVEY. I’m asking you to take a few minutes to help us become the best CSA we can be. Second, you’ll find a link to our Thanksgiving Share page here: Windflower Farm’s 2025 Winter Share. There is still time to lock in your box of Delicata and butternut squashes, root vegetables, fresh greens, apple cider, Honey Crisp apples and more. Third, there are many people to thank. Very important among them are the organizers in your neighborhood who make this work and without whom we’d not have this special thing called CSA. Thank you one and all! Fourth and finally, there is you. All of us at Windflower Farm thank you for being with us. For trusting us with a big portion of your food dollars. For putting up with us through light weeks and heavy. And for being as interested as you are in food and farming and being part of our supportive CSA community.

I wish you and yours a healthy and happy holiday season, Ted

Delivery #19, Week of October 5th, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Our Basil or Cilantro from Denison Farm (choice of 1)
  • Chard
  • Spinach
  • Kale 
  • Beans
  • Summer squash/zucchini 
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Broccoli
  • Sweet peppers
  • Leeks
  • Chiles

Your fruit share will be Ginger Gold apples from Yonder Farm.

News from the Farm

Maintaining a healthy and fertile soil, as you probably know, is central to the sustainability of our small farm. Our crops are only as good as the land on which they are grown. If the arugula is pale, it’s likely to be lacking nitrogen. If the beans are prematurely woody, or the skin on our peppers is wrinkled, the soil was probably too dry. We work hard to try to get this right. This time of year, after harvesting leaves many of the farm’s fields bare, we put much of our soil health plan into action. For Nate, that has meant sowing a blend of cover crops. Last week’s rain allowed us to sinkour tillage equipment into the earth to prepare the ground for planting. The cover crop blend he’s sowing this week includes Medium Red clover, Hairy Vetch and cereal rye. He spins it on with the whirlybird or cyclone spreader and then runs over the ground with the cultipacker to improve seed-soil contact. We’re expecting rain this week and are in a hurry to cover crop a few acres beforehand. It’s our intention to have every bed on the farm covered with a soil building “green manure” crop before the season is over.

This week, we will be sending you Windflower Farm sweet potatoes. They’ve been in our curing chamber for the past two weeks, with the humidity set near 100% and the thermostat at 80°. I hope this has been long enough to turn the roots’ starches into sugars, but it’s impossible to know without eating them. They are unwashed and in a paper bag, which is a fine way of storing them. Some additional time in a warm spot in your kitchen wouldn’t hurt. They’ll get sweeter with time. We’ll send more sweet potatoes over the next three weeks, and then it will be the end of October and the CSA season will be over. Unless, of course, you buy a winter share.

Winter CSA Share 

For nearly 20 years, we have offered a winter CSA share, but this year’s will be a little different. The drought left us with a significantly smaller fall harvest than usual. We will have just enough of a crop for only one truly bountiful delivery, and we will make it on the Saturday before Thanksgiving (November 22nd). This “Thanksgiving Share” will consist of a wide variety of storage vegetables, including butternut squash, red and yellow onions, leeks, garlic, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, and beets, plus an abundance of fresh greens (spinach, kale, lettuce) from our high tunnels, apples and cider from the Borden Farm, and optional grains, maple products and eggs from neighboring farmers. Click on the following link to learn more about this year’s winter share and to register: Windflower Farm’s 2025 Winter Share. We hope you’ll be able to join us. 

Have a great week, 

Ted

Delivery #18, Week of September 28th, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Spinach 
  • Mustard Greens
  • Radicchio
  • Parsley
  • Leeks
  • Broccoli
  • Beans
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Pie Pumpkins OR Delicata Squash
  • Tomatoes

Your fruit share will be fresh Empire Apples from Yonder Farm.

News from the farm

It rained on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, giving us a total of more than 3 inches. Hallelujah! It was so much rain all at once that our electronic rain gauge couldn’t produce a reliable figure. Already, it seems, the grass is greener. And we’ve been able to move on to other activities. We live just 35 miles south of the Adirondack Park “blueline.” To celebrate the arrival of rain, we went paddling for the day in Lower Saranac Lake, where we enjoyed the company of loons and peak fall colors.

Our soils are rolling and rocky, making them less than ideal for the kind of work we do. Still, they are highly productive soils and have yielded record corn crops and some very good vegetables. The rolling aspect of our farm is not a great problem, and not one that can be easily remedied anyway. To be sure, it can make the tractor ride more exciting. We’ve learned that brakes should be fully operational. Having adapted to being hill farmers, we’ve also learned to farm on the contour to prevent erosion. 

Rocks, on the other hand, can be a problem. Hand picking, something we’ve done for 25 years, has helped, but it hasn’t been enough and it is back breaking. Last December, we made the decision to spend some of our equipment budget on a Rock-O-Matic, a big pull-behind rock picking machine.  We found one in Ontario and had it shipped here just ahead of the Trump tariffs. Because potato harvesting brings a huge number of rocks to the surface, we decided to start our rock picking there. The quantity of rockscoming out of the field has been staggering. Our farm won’t be stone-free overnight, but the improvement makes me think that we might grow straight carrots here one day!

Have a great week, Ted

Delivery #17, Week of September 22nd, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Lettuce
  • Arugula
  • Bok Choy
  • Tomatoes
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Bunched beets
  • Yellow Onions
  • Yellow Potatoes
  • Delicata Squash

Spinach, carrots, cilantro, red onions and radicchio will be coming next week. Next week’s tomatoes may be the last of the season.

The fruit share will be Yonder Farm’s Bosc pears. We expect to send apples next week.

News from the farm

A couple of Eastern Wood Pewees are chatting away outside my window on this first day of fall. I imagine that they are discussing the drought, which is surely impacting their lives as much as it is ours. It must make finding drinking water more difficult. Is finding food more difficult, too? I’ve noticed that there are far fewer insects.   

We are fortunate in having a deep and plentiful well. It was drilled for us by Clarence Gould and his son, Clarence Jr. In return for our $6,500, they promised us 12 gallons of water per minute and ended up giving what they estimated to be a hundred. Jan spent the day with them while they drilled, which may have encouraged them to prolong their drilling. We ended up with a well that is 470’ deep and a resource that has been our salvation on more than one occasion. While our two ponds and newest well have gone dry, this one deep well keeps our greenhouses, field crops and produce packing station going. It is no exaggeration to say that without irrigation, we’d have been unable to produce a single crop this year. It’s been that dry. Yesterday, Nate irrigated Swiss chard, spinach, bok choy, kale, lettuce and arugula. Today, he irrigated two blocks of broccoli and cabbage.

It’s been a tough growing season for more than those of us who grow vegetables. Nearby dairy farmers are under stress, too – some have had to bring outside water to their herds and, because they expect declines in forage and grain production, will have to purchase additional feed. The drought is widespread. NASA has reported that the rate of drying of the Earth’s soil has accelerated worldwide. Dry places are getting dryer, while wet places are not getting wetter. Locally, the level of Lake Champlain is five feet below where it was in July. This fall, many trees are bypassing their colorful foliage stage, going directly from green to brown.

We had a first-hand peek at ground water levels here at the farm when we did some work on our well last week. Normally, ground water lies 12’ below the surface here, but now it is 16’ below ground level. We have invested nearly $3000 in cover crops seeds this year, but we’re not sure if they will germinate and so they sit in our barn unplanted. The 10-day weather forecast promises hit-or-miss showers, and we remain hopeful.

Have a great week, Ted