Tag: farm news

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 #21 Week of October 19th, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Broccoli
  • Red onions
  • Yellow onions
  • Lettuce
  • Cabbage
  • Kale
  • Arugula
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Garlic
  • Delicata Squash

CHOICE of one of the following: Carrots from Denison Farm or Beets or Yellow potatoes

The fruit share this week will be Sweet Maia apples from Yonder Farm. 

News from the farm 

We’ve been wrapping up the planting of next year’s onions and garlic this week. They’ve gone into mulched beds – twenty-two 400-footers so far – and soon we’ll cover them with the floating row covers that will keep them snug until spring. Your CSA shares will include the last of our fall 2024 crop.

The growing season is winding down quickly. Cover crops are taking off. Most of our storage crops have either already been harvested or will be soon. You can still find stray beds of beets, kohlrabi, leeks, cabbage, broccoli and greens, but they will be brought in this week or next. We’ll clean up greenhouses, tuck irrigation supplies away, and then the CSA season will be over.

We will soon turn our attention to a half-built equipment barn. The trusses and steel have arrived. We hope to have the roof finished by Thanksgiving.

If you are a half-share member of our CSA and pick up on odd-weeks, this week’s share will be your last of the season. Thank you for being with us. We hope you have enjoyed your CSA experience. Feel free to send a note any time sharing your thoughts.

If you are as disappointed as we are that the CSA season is coming to an end, you might be interested in our Thanksgiving Share. Find out more here: Windflower Farm’s 2025 Winter Share. The Thanksgiving Share will consist of a wide variety of storage vegetables, including butternut squash, red andyellow 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. We hope you can join us. 

Have a great week, 

Ted

Delivery #20: Week of October 12th, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Broccoli
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Yellow potatoes 
  • Leeks
  • Lettuce
  • Escarole 
  • Braising greens 
  • Chiles
  • Delicata squash
  • Sweet peppers
  • Garlic
  • Carrots from Denison Farm

The fruit share this week is Macintosh apples from Yonder Farm. 

Your last maple and grain shares will be delivered this week. If you ordered them, please pick them up. 


News from the farm 

Our frost sensitive vegetables were zapped late last week when temperatures dropped below freezing for several hours. Among the ruined crops were snap beans, summer squashes, peppers, eggplants, and basil. We were not heart broken. This is the normal for a first killing Frost in the Northeast. We harvested what we could ahead of the cold and will send some combination of them this week. And then it’s on to more seasonal vegetables, including sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, carrots, beets, and butternut and delicata squashes.

On Saturday, Nate and I had the farm to ourselves and we spent it working on fall cleanup projects. We picked up drip irrigation lines from bean and leek and sweet corn beds. Using a hydraulic winder mounted to the back of the John Deere, we rolled the lines onto galvanized spools and tucked them away for reuse next year. We then spread compost and prepared ground for the garlic and onion planting slated to begin on Sunday, when much of the farmteam would be reassembled. 

First on their morning to-do list was harvesting lettuce, probably the last of the season, a mix of braising greens, and escarole, out of which you’ll be able to make a nice bean soup. By noon Salvador, Candelaria and their daughter-in-law, Lizet, had begun planting onions into the mulched beds where our last planting of zucchinis had been growing as recently a day before. When we deploy plastic mulch, as we often do for zucchini, we like to get as many uses out of it as we can. We’ll plant more of next year’s onions into beds that have been growing other crops on mulches, including butternut squash andcucumbers.

Daniel and Martin spent the afternoon washing and sanitizing tubs and then washing potatoes. Later in the day, in preparation for a rainy next day, the guys quickly pulled leeks enough for what would amount to 500 bunches once they are trimmed and cleaned up. It takes a good deal of time to do the processing, and everyone will be glad to be doing it in the greenhouse out of the October rain.

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 #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