Tag: homesteading

Delivery #6, Week of July 7, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Green oakleaf lettuce
  • Red leaf lettuce
  • Swiss chard
  • Slicing cucumbers
  • Asian cucumber
  • Zucchini/Summer Squash
  • Sweet onion
  • Purple kohlrabi
  • Tomatoes
  • Choice of Napa Cabbage OR Spinach OR Happy Rich Broccolini

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

Coming soon: tomatoes, basil, bunched beets, and radicchio

News from the farm

We are harvesting the last of the overwintered onions and the first of the garlic today. The onions are a variety called ‘Forum’ that we’ve grown for years using sets produced in Holland, and they appear to have loved this season’s cool and wet spring. The garlic is a variety of ‘German White’ called ‘Music.’ Early indications are that it’s a lovely crop: good size, pretty color, and free of disease. Harvesting can be tough on the back, so we are bringing out some new tools. The first, a battery-powered electric hedge trimmer, lets us quickly trim the garlic to a length while it’s still in the field, allowing us to operate the tractor-mounted bed-lifter without separating the stem from the bulb. Following these two steps, it is much less difficult to pull the bulb out of the ground: we just grab it by its shortened stem and pull.  We’ll place the garlic in bulb crates and place them in the greenhouse for a week of drying to help preserve the crop for future distributions. Nate has planted a half dozen other varieties that we’ll harvest in the same way next week. They go by names like “Ozark,’ ‘Estonian Red,’ ‘Shandong Purple,’ and ‘Idaho Silver.’ The fall-planted ‘Ed’s Red’ (Dutch) and ‘Crème Brule’ (French) shallots are next on the early Allium harvest list.

Other upcoming harvests: tomatoes and basil. Summer is here and these will begin to show up soon! I’ve had my first of the season in the form of a cold gazpacho on a hot day last week. Hmmm.

Have a great week, Ted

PS. If you ordered a hat, they will be coming on the truck to your site this week and next week. Please stay tuned for an email from us about when your hat will be delivered.

Delivery #1, Week of May 26, 2025

The News From Windflower Farm

Hello from all of us at Windflower Farm! Thank you for being with us for the 2025 growing season. Your first shares of the season will be delivered this week.

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • ‘Coastal Star’ Romaine lettuce
  • ‘Red Russian’ kale
  • ‘Fordhook’ Swiss chard
  • ‘Astro’ arugula (a small bunch)
  • Baby bunched Dutch shallots
  • Potted purple or green basil
  • Egg shares start this week.
  • Fruit shares will start in a week or two.

News from the farm

Let’s begin by acknowledging that it’s been a miserable spring. I can hardly remember when I last felt the sunshine or was outside in temperatures warmer than 60-something. Yesterday’s high was 59 degrees, and it is the warmest it’s been in a week. I’m still wearing my thermals! Rainfall so far this May has been 5 inches above normal. The average brightness and solar radiation for the month of May has been just 2/3 of normal. It has been a spring unlike anything we’ve experienced.

These cool, wet and generally bleak conditions have presented us with challenges, but we are feeling optimistic. We have done much over the years to mitigate the effects of foul weather on our production. This year, we have deployed every manner of season-extending paraphernalia, from greenhouse plastics and floating row covers to soil-warming black plastic and woven fabric mulches to encourage our crops. And we use a permanent raised bed system to help achieve earliness.

The field season got underway on Earth Day this year and our first delivery will take place on Rachel Carson’s birthday. In those five weeks, we have planted tomatoes in two large greenhouses and 11 smaller greenhouses (which we call caterpillars). We have planted cucumbers in one large greenhouse, one caterpillar and three 375’ long low tunnels. We have planted peppers in seven caterpillars, lettuces in two caterpillars, kale in two more, and zucchinis in three 375′ low tunnels. And we have planted numerous beds of greens and early root crops in the field and covered them with floating row covers.

All of this is to say that, despite the cold and gray, the start to this season will appear very much like that of any other year – it’s a time for salads. We are happy to be getting started and hope you enjoy your first share.  

Best regards, Ted and the Windflower Team

PS: Windflower Farm hats are once again available for purchase:  If you are interested in a hat, please use this link to order:Windflower Farm Hat Order Form. We will send your hat to your site later this season. 

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!