Tag: food

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 #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 #16, Week of September 15th, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Butterhead lettuce
  • Lacinato kale
  • Mustard mix
  • Garlic
  • Tomatoes
  • Peppers
  • Happy Rich broccolini
  • Sweet corn
  • Adirondack Red potatoes Fresh green beans
  • Summer squash/zucchini
  • Chiles

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

News from the farm

September is a wonderful month. My favorite: cool nights, warm days, dry weather. Rain would be welcome, but there is nothing in the ten-day forecast. Fortunately, our irrigation hardware and our schedules seem to be working. They are stressed and could stand improvement, but they have been satisfactory. Perhaps we’ll take a trip to California this winter to see how they water their crops in that near-desert landscape. It is also our good fortune that Nate, our chief irrigation engineer, is young and is still holding up well, if looking a little tired. An additional reason to enjoy the cooler weather of September is that heating up the kitchen for meal preparation is pleasant once again. Last week, Jan made an incredible ginger-carrot soup and this morning she made sweet potato lasagna (this time with cardamom and cinnamon). Carrots and sweet potatoes will be in your shares very soon: carrots from our friends at Denison Farm and our own sweet potatoes once they’ve been cured in our hothouse. Summer comes to a close at the end of this week. Tomatoes will gradually be replaced with potatoes and winter squashes will take the place of summer squashes and zucchinis. After another week of pears, your final five fruit shares will consist of apples, mostly varieties good for eating out of hand, but also apples suitable for baking.    

Have a wonderful week, Ted

Delivery #15, Week of September 8th, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Lettuce
  • Arugula
  • Garlic
  • Yellow onions
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Winter squash (acorn squash)
  • Tomatoes
  • Parsley
  • Potatoes
  • Sweet Corn

The fruit share will be the last of Yonder Farm’s peaches. We expect to send Bartlet pears next week. Fall plums and all kinds of apples are on the horizon.

News from the farm

A much-anticipated weather system late last week delivered just one tenth of an inch of rain, and so our drought continued. The lawn is brown, as are the trees out the kitchen window. Some golds and reds are evident as the fall foliage season gets underway. It is Saturday afternoon and once again we await the arrival of a system that is supposed to bring rain. I have withheld a spray of the fungus Spinosad, which would reduce flea beetle populations in our arugula and broccoli, in the understanding that rain would wash off the expensive material. In the meantime, Nate has been wiring a voltage converter that will enable us to bring an old well online. It might rain and it might not, but irrigation goes on. What a year!

Daniel, whose grandfather Ezequiel was our first foreign employee nearly twenty years ago, has worked with his extended family on our farm ever since his high school graduation. There is very little on the farm that he can’t do, and that extends to his role as our delivery truck driver. He became a citizen last year and he married Lizet, a young woman from his hometown of Laguna Prieta in Guanajuato. Lizet joined our field team last year and is working on her tractor driving skills and English language proficiency. Daniel and Lizet have just received promising news from USCIS regarding Lizet’s petition for permanent residency (aka, a green card) – a final determination interview has been scheduled for late October. It is hard to overstate what this petition means for the economic future of this young couple. We are cautiously optimistic.

We attended a Town Hall last night featuring Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin who came to Glens Falls to give a boost to the campaign of Blake Gendebien, who is trying to unseat Elise Stefanik, our representative in Congress. Of obvious interest to me are both that Blake is a dairy farmer who recognizes the challenges associated with my kind of business and that he appreciates and values the role of our guest workers and the vital importance of treating them with dignity and respect.

Tired of waiting for this latest weather system to develop, I’m about to prepare beds for the last field seedings of the season. Nate has made a blend of the seeds of several mild mustard greens, kales, and choy and will sow them shortly afterwards. I’ll also prepare for the last of our transplants, including kale, choy and lettuce. After a difficult summer greens season, made especially hard by the combination of hail and heat and drought, the late summer is shaping up to be better for greens. Radicchio, spinach, arugula, lettuce, escarole, bok choy, Swiss chard, mustard mix, and Red Russian kale are all coming during the next few weeks. Just as I was heading out, it started to rain, delivering just a quarter inch in total, but enough to make plants happy and to keep us out of the field for the rest of the day.

Have a great week, Ted