Tag: gardening

Distribution #3, January 11, 2025

Winter News from Windflower Farm

Happy New Year from all of us at Windflower Farm! Your third and final box of the winter season will arrive this Saturday.

What you’ll get this month

  • Purple and ‘Toscano’ kale and spinach from our winter greenhouses
  • Sweet potatoes, Russet potatoes and a purple potato variety
  • A butternut squash (from friends at Denison Farm)
  • A bagful of yellow onions and ‘Rosa di Milano’ onions
  • Carrots, beets and celeriac in another bag
  • A jar of jelly made by our friend Deb using her own organically grown berries
  • And a bag of (mostly) ‘Ruby Frost’ apples from the Borden Farm

Special note: Please take home the winter share’s cardboard box and recycle it. Thank you!

News from the farm

We took the final harvest of the season today from our unheated high tunnel #3, and without much sunshine, it was cold. We were a team of five, so the workload was not heavy, but we were all happy when we were finished and we could head to the warmth of the barn. The greens were not only inside a greenhouse, but they were hooped and covered by two layers of a row cover made from spun polypropylene that looks like a painter’s ground cloth. Uncovering the greens on this frigid day, it was gratifying to see the healthy beds of dark green and purple kale and bright green spinach. There are few pests in winter greens. Still, the kale suffered a little from the cold; although it is good now, you should probably use it up within the week. The spinach will keep longer.

On this final harvest day of the season, we received our first box of seeds for next season. These came from High Mowing Seeds, a small New England purveyor of organically produced seeds for Northern growers. As a certified organic grower, Windflower Farm is required (and would choose anyway) to buy organically grown seeds. One of the many benefits of this requirement is that there is now a cottage industry in small scale seed production. Nate took a course in seed saving last winter, and we have been saving seeds of a few favorites. Now there are opportunities for small scale farms to generate additional sales by growing seed crops to sell to organic seed purveyors – a little seed side hustle. High Mowing was featured in the excellent book, The Town That Food Saved, by Ben Hewitt. The town, Hardwick, Vermont, was by coincidence where I first learned to farm many years ago.

And that’s a wrap. Thanks very much for being with us during these first several weeks of winter. Take good care. You’ll hear from us soon regarding the 2025 season.

Best wishes, Ted and the team

Winter Share Distribution No. 1 November 16, 2024

The News from Windflower Farm

Things to remember: Please arrive on time. Winter distributions for Central Brooklyn CSA  are at 1251 Dean St. from 4:30 to 6:00

What’s in the share?

  • Lettuce
  • Red Russian kale or Purple Russian kale
  • Mixed mustard greens
  • Broccoli (check for caterpillars, rinse where necessary)
  • Carrots
  • Russet potatoes
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Butternut squash
  • Red and yellow onions
  • Borden Farm apples and
  • Borden Farm apple cider

Your vegetables, fruit and cider are in a large cardboard box that you can keep. The box is heavy! We recommend a wagon, cart, or a friend to help you carry it home. 

Next month’s share will include beets, carrots, kohlrabi, spinach, kale, potatoes, sweet potatoes, buttercup and butternut squashes, apples from the Borden Farm, and Harry’s honey.

Please remember to pick up your eggs, maple, and grains if you’ve ordered them.

A note about grains: Kristoffer from Hickory Wind Farm here- thanks indeed to everyone who signed up for grain shares, we’re glad of your support and to have had a good harvest to offer. Your November distribution includes bags of both Turkey Red Flour (Item 1) and Medina Flour (Item 2), please ensure you get one of each as you pick up. The bag of Medina should be sufficient to make two large sets of very nice pie crusts, if you have a wish to make some for Thanksgiving. A recipe for crusts and apple pie is now included on our website: 

https://hickorywindfarm.net/pages/recipes. You can also find our suggested Turkey Red bread recipe on that page. Thanks! – Kristoffer

What’s new on the farm?

I’m writing on Thursday morning. The landscape outside my front window has the look of Mid-November: the leaves are gone and a frost covers the lawn. We’ve delayed the harvest until 10:00 this morning because overnight temperatures were well below freezing. Greens that are harvested while still frozen will turn to mush afterwards while those that are allowed to thaw prior to harvesting will be fine. We’ll start with kale in the greenhouse which, while unheated, is still warmer than the outside. We’ll then head to the field for the lettuce and mustard mix that are still growing under floating row covers. It will likely be our final field harvest of the season and there is a festive feeling to the day.

Best wishes, Ted, Jan and Nate

Distribution No. 22, Week of October 28, 2024

The News from Windflower Farm

It’s winter share signup season! The deadline to sign up is November 1st or until our CSA is full. Winter shares are selling out quickly, so please do not delay if you would like one. Please read below to learn more. 

What’s in the share?

  • Lettuce
  • Swiss chard
  • Carrots
  • Caraflex cabbage, pointy variety
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Butternut squash
  • Delicata or acorn squash (choice)
  • Rosemary
  • Broccoli
  • Fennel 
  • Baby ginger
  • Leeks

Baby ginger is spicy, juicy and does not need to be peeled. Put it in a plastic bag and refrigerate for up to a week or freeze. You can easily grate frozen ginger for soups and curries using a microplane.

Fruit shares ended two weeks ago. The fruit share was 20 weeks for full share members and 10 weeks for half share members. If you had a fruit share this year, we hope you enjoyed it.  

What’s new on the farm?

We’ve just come in from harvesting Nate’s ginger. I call it Nate’s because he’s the one who introduced the crop to our farm and because he found Biker Dude, the Hawaiian source of our ‘mother’ ginger roots. My fingers are still cold – a cold wind blew throughout the day and temperatures failed to get out of the forties. Nate made changes to how he grew the crop this year: he planted it outdoors under low tunnels, a technique that worked especially well in this warm summer. In the Northeast, it’s usually grown in the greenhouse. And, because it was grown outdoors, we could harvest all of it with a carrot bed lifter mounted on our John Deere, allowing us to ditch the pitchforks, our usual harvest aids, and saving us a good deal of physical effort.

Salvador, Candelaria and Liz planted the last two beds of garlic today, including a handful of experimental varieties. The final task is to cover the acre and a half of fall Alliums with two layers of Covertan, a floating row cover that will mitigate winter’s temperature extremes. Daniel and his cousins Martin and Miriam are dismantling Caterpillar tunnels, the structures in which we grew your tomatoes, sweet peppers and early cucumbers. Plant debris goes into a compost pile that is growing ever larger, and plastic covers are put away until next spring. The heavy lifting is nearly done.

We harvested some additional odds and ends today for this final share of the season, including a pointed cabbage variety called ‘Caraflex.’ Because of a stroke of good luck in which a recent frost killed off the weeds that had inundated two of our fall beds, a pretty crop of frost-hardy Swiss chard reappeared and became a part of today’s harvest, too. And with this bit of serendipity, we are wrapping up the farm season. This week’s delivery is the final one of the 2024 summer season. Jan, Nate and I hope you’ve enjoyed your shares. Thank you very much for being with us. Please send me an email with any feedback or suggestions (tedblomgren@gmail.com). Thank you, too, to those of you who are core group organizers. We couldn’t do this without you. Finally, a big thanks to the Windflower Farm team, a thoughtful, hard-working and good-humored group of people that make it a delight to show up every day.

Best wishes,

Ted, Jan and Nate

Last chance for a winter share!

Purchasing a winter share is your chance to extend the fruit and vegetable season through the New Year.

What is it? In a nutshell, the winter share consists of a total of three one-bushel boxes, one delivered every fourth Saturday from mid-November through earlyJanuary (November 16th, December 14th, and January 11th). It contains a big bag of fresh greens (kale, spinach and more), 8-10 lb. of vegetables from our root cellar (including winter squashes, “Irish” and sweet potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, and other storage veggies), 4-6 lb. of delicious apples (and pears if available) from the Borden Farm, and a sweet treat every month (the Borden’s apple cider, Harry’s honey, and Deb’s jam). Optional grain, maple and egg shares are also available. Please follow the link for more details and to sign up.

Click here to learn more: Windflower Farm’s 2024-2025 Winter Share (wufoo.com).  We hope you’ll join us for the winter share season!

Distribution No. 21, Week of October 21, 2024

The News from Windflower Farm

It’s winter share signup season! Please read below to learn more.

For those of you who purchased every-other-week shares and selected odd week deliveries, this is your last share of the season. We hope you’ve enjoyed your share of the harvest. Drop us a line any time to let us know your thoughts about the experience and to offer ideas for how we might improve the CSA going forward. Thank you very much for being with us. We hope to see you soon. You may reach us at windflowercsa@gmail.com. For everyone else, next week’s share will be your last.

What’s in the share?

  • Spinach
  • Kale
  • Bok choy
  • Potatoes
  • Leeks
  • Carrots
  • Ginger
  • Sweet potatoes
  • Butternut squashes
  • Sweet peppers

What’s new on the farm?

It’s 67 degrees and sunny outside, which is very pleasant to be working in, if a bit unusual for late October. Tree colors are at their peak or just past, and are lovely. I can see the yellow of sugar maples out my front window as I sit to write. We’ve just had lunch. The packing team – Victoria, Kristoffer and Kage – washed greens, leeks and ginger this morning, and are on to packing and labelling shipping containers. Sam, one of our working members, spent the morning with them, so they are in good shape. Andrea is busy recording winter share signups, after which she’ll join in the packing. Salvador, Candelaria and the four youngsters in their family, Daniel, Martin, Miriam and Liz, having wrapped up the morning broccoli harvest and the planting of the last three beds of winter greens this morning are now planting onions. Jan and Nate spent the morning packing butternut squashes, and now they are heading out to the ginger patch to harvest for the Thursday delivery. Where would we be without these wonderful people?! I’ll join them shortly. All is well in this tiny corner of the world, if just for now.  

A winter share anyone?

Purchasing a winter share is your chance to extend the fruit and vegetable season through the New Year.

What is it? In a nutshell, the winter share consists of a total of three one-bushel boxes, one delivered every fourth Saturday from mid-November through early January (November 16th, December 14th, and January 11th). It contains a big bag of fresh greens (kale, spinach and more), 8-10 lb. of vegetables from our root cellar (including winter squashes, “Irish” and sweet potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, and other storage veggies), 4-6 lb. of delicious apples (and pears if available) from the Borden Farm, and a sweet treat every month (the Borden’s apple cider, Harry’s honey, and Deb’s jam). Optional grain, maple and egg shares are also available. Please follow the link for more details and to sign up.

Click here to learn more: Windflower Farm’s 2024-2025 Winter Share (wufoo.com).

We hope you’ll join us for the winter share season!

Best wishes, Ted

Distribution No. 20, Week of October 14, 2024

The News from Windflower Farm

It’s winter share signup season! Please read below to learn more.

The last grain and maple shares will be sent this week. If you ordered an October grain and/or maple share, please be sure to pick them up. 

What’s in the share?

  • The last of our sweet peppers
  • Lettuce
  • Kale mix
  • Spinach or swiss chard (choice)
  • Sweet potatoes
  • A bagful of shallots and chiles
  • Pie pumpkin
  • Carrots
  • Broccoli or cauliflower (choice)

Your fruit share will be one or two of the new apple varieties growing at Yonder Farm, possibly ‘Snapdragon’ or ‘Ludicrisp’.

Coming next week: leeks, potatoes, Rosemary, carrots, Butternut squash, lettuce, purple kale, chiles, ginger and more sweet potatoes.

If you see Don, the man who drives our delivery truck with Daniel on Thursdays, wish him a happy birthday – he turned 75 last week!

What’s new on the farm?

The swirling deep rose and light blues of the Aurora Borealis dominated the night sky here late last week. I am told that the spectacle was the result of interactions between the sun’s solar winds and the earth’s magnetic field. With that, and a significant temperature cool down and two rainy days, the summer farm season seemed to give way to fall over the weekend. Freeze warnings sent us to the field with floating row covers to protect the tender greens and ginger we have yet to harvest. Seasonal deadlines have given some bounce to our step – with just three weeks remaining in the field season, there is much to do. We harvested all the remaining sweet peppers, chiles and eggplants yesterday. Just a few odd beds of leeks, potatoes and carrots remain to be harvested. In the days before, we took down all the tomato vines, producing a compost heap that is now larger than my house. Next, we’ll pick up pepper stakes, bundle the irrigation headers, and roll up the caterpillar tunnel plastic for use next year.

While I composted and shaped an acre or so of field beds for fall Allium plantings (garlic, onions, shallots and an experimental leek variety), Nate chisel plowed and applied compost to the tunnels where we’ll plant winter greens starting later today. On Wednesday, I’ll pick up 2,000 lbs. of rye and hairy vetch seed from friends at The Farm at Miller’s Crossing to sow on any remaining bare ground. In sections of the farm intended for the earliest spring 2025 plantings, we have shaped beds prior to cover cropping. In this way, just a shallow skim tilling will be needed ahead of next year’s earliest transplanting.

A winter share anyone?

Purchasing a winter share is your chance to extend the fruit and vegetable season through the New Year.

What is it? In a nutshell, the winter share consists of a total of three one-bushel boxes, one delivered every fourth Saturday from mid-November through early January (November 16th, December 14th, and January 11th). It contains a big bag of fresh greens (kale, spinach and more), 8-10 lb. of vegetables from our root cellar (including winter squashes, “Irish” and sweet potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, and other storage veggies), 4-6 lb. of delicious apples (and pears if available) from the Borden Farm, and a sweet treat every month (the Borden’s apple cider, Harry’s honey, and Deb’s jam). Optional grain, maple and egg shares are also available. Please follow the link for more details and to sign up.

Click here to learn more: Windflower Farm’s 2024-2025 Winter Share (wufoo.com).

We hope you’ll join us for the winter share season!

Take care, Ted