Tag: local food

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 #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 #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

Delivery #11, Week of August 11, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Lettuce
  • Swiss chard
  • Tomatoes
  • Peppers
  • Eggplant
  • Onions
  • Parsley
  • Assorted squashes
  • An organic greenhouse cucumber from our friend Andrew Knafle at Clearbrook Farm

We are between plantings of sweet corn. More should arrive in next week’s shares.

The fruit share will consist of Yonder Farm’s plums this week. We’ll be back to their peaches next week. Sorry, the fruit share will be peaches instead of plums this week! 

Thanks again and enjoy!

News from the farm

Sunday. I gave up after spending an hour or so reading the NY Times. I have no bandwidth left today for another of the Administration’s abominations. The only news I want today would have rain in the forecast. But search as I might among all three of my weather apps, I could find nothing but hot and dry for the foreseeable future. I water the plants in our greenhouse – the last cucurbits of the season and another round of greens – and then go in search of Nate, who is switching irrigation from lettuces, kale and basil in H2 to sweet corn and Nightshades in H1. These are fields we normally irrigate from the middle pond but, because of the need for water rationing in the north half of the farm, we are irrigating from the barn well. He is fussing with a booster pump he put in place to push water along the final 400’ of pipe.  

Seated at the kitchen table later in the day, I can see Nate in the Front field. He’s seeding with the Sutton Seed Spider, a tool we had shipped to us from the Salinas Valley in California. It is the seeder favored by growers of carrots and spinach. On Nate’s seeding list are arugula, a mix of salad greens, beets and Swiss chard. It’s August, so immediately following seeding he’ll set up some sprinklers. The earth is so parched that we’d get nothing without artificial irrigation. They are accustomed to this out West, but here it is still a part of the new normal of production.

My brother has passed by on a mowing rig, having just cut the grass in the sheep pasture near the barn. The sheep are now in their new summer pasture and appear to be loving it. They are Icelandic sheep and spend the hot part of the day in the shade. If you were to walk by their pasture after dark, however, you’d hear nothing but the tearing of grass and the chomping of sheep’s teeth. I have spotted fox or coyote droppings – I don’t know which – all around the barnyard and in the tunnel in which we are drying onions and garlic, but I have not spotted any of the responsible party. I worry about the chickens, which are nearby, but not the sheep, which are protected by a deer fence and an electrified net fence. Plus, although they might be small, their horns are formidable.

I think of Coastal Maine during the month of August and of lobster and swimming in cold water. To take me there, I’ve been reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s first novel, Stern Men. Remarkably, many if not most early lobstermen didn’t know how to swim.

Hoping you find a way to stay cool this week, Ted