Tag: local food

Delivery #7, Week of July 13, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Lettuce
  • Tomatoes
  • Basil
  • Kale OR Greens Mix (your choice)
  • Arugula
  • Cucumbers
  • Yellow onions
  • Zucchini/Squash

Everything in this week’s share was grown organically at Windflower Farm

Your fruit share will be a pint of our own organically grown blueberries

News from the farm

On Thursday afternoon of last week, we had an impromptu visit by officials from the US Department of Labor and a significant hailstorm, and we will be feeling the impacts of these for the next couple of weeks.

Lucky us, the DOL inspector told Jan that he intends to do a full 5-year audit of our farm’s labor practices. Many farmers can spend their entire careers without encountering a federal DOL official. He also told Janthat our farm worker housing was the nicest he’d ever seen, which I hope he remembers when he encounters the inevitable shortcomings in my paperwork.

Farm workers and farm raids by ICE have been much in the news lately. Daniel, the young man from Mexico you might have met if you encountered our delivery truck, told me about the worker abuses at a farm in New Jersey that employs many of his neighbors from Guanajuato, the most flagrant of which is that they take so many “payroll deductions” from their paychecks that they effectively get only 55% of what they are entitled to. They are getting just $10/hour when they should be getting nearly $18.00. Why don’t they make a complaint?, I wondered. Because there is no way to earn $700/week in Mexico, was the answer. And they are willing to work the 70 hours a week their New Jersey farmer requires of them to earn it. Make a complaint and the job vanishes. These are the people who grow our food. We cannot allow them to betreated that way.

When it comes to the details of the audit here, I’m not worried about a bad outcome: we work hard to do everything by the book. Still, it will take hours to get together the paperwork they’ve asked for. My goal is to have it done by Monday because I want time to prepare for the Department of Agriculture produce safety inspection that is coming up on Wednesday.

The hailstorm, the other thing that happened on Thursday, caused substantial damage. The wind-driven hailstones came straight out of the north, shredding leaves and blowing the plastic off a greenhouse. Fortunately, we grow most of your tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in tunnels, and some of your greens under cover. Most of the current crop of summer squashes and zucchinis were ruined, but more will come along soon. The young greens will recover, although this and next week’s greens will no doubt show some of the damage. The potatoes and squash and corn were all flattened, but I am confident that they’ll come back. We’ve experienced worse.

Best wishes, Ted

Delivery #4, Week of June 16, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

Happy Juneteenth! Our sites will be open for regular distribution on Thursday, June 19th. If you are not able to pick up your share due to the holiday, you’re welcome to ask a friend, family member, or neighbor to pick up for you. Please ask them to provide your name when they pick up your share. 

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Butterhead lettuce
  • Purple kohlrabi
  • Crunchy King radishes
  • Red Russian kale
  • Mixed adolescent mustard greens
  • Garlic scapes
  • Bunched baby onions
  • Happy Rich broccolini

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

The first distribution of maple and grain shares is this week. If you ordered one, please pick them up at your site.  

News from the farm

The arrival late last week of sunshine and warm weather and the forecast of more to come has been welcomed by all of us on the farm. Happy Rich responded by shooting up its Raab-like florets, and summer squashes and cucumbers have begun to put on size. It is likely you’ll get one of these vegetables in your share this week, with more to come soon.

We rarely spray, and never with anything not approved by the National Organic Standards Board. But wet (or humid) and cloudy conditions usually enable diseases to gain a foothold, which appears to have been the case in our high tunnel cucumbers, and I have pulled out my backpack sprayer. We love the promise of greenhouse cucumbers, but so far our lived experience has come up short. Our crop currently has a disease called Angular Leaf Spot, which is caused by a bacterium that can survive on seeds, including those purchased from reputable seed companies. Because our county extension agent is a friend, Andrea and I reached out to him for a confirmation of our diagnosis and management advice. At this point, he told us, our only recourse as organic growers is to remove infested older leaves and to spray elemental copper every week. And so, I sprayed. And I might spray again this week. The chief danger is to the guy operating the sprayer: copper is not something you want to get on your skin or in your eyes. Copper might exist as a surface residue on the cucumber fruit at harvest; it does not penetrate the skin. We will wash your cukes at the farm and you should wash them again at home. If you are concerned, you might consider peeling your cucumbers.  In the meantime, our field grown plants are perfectly healthy.

In other news, our organic certification inspection took place last Thursday. Although we won’t receive formal notification from PCO (Pennsylvania Certified Organic, our certifier) for a couple of weeks, it appeared to me to go well, and our exit interview highlighted nothing of concern.

Have a great week. Best wishes, Ted

PS. Windflower Farm hats are once again available for purchase. If you would like one or two hats, please preorder them here: Windflower Farm’s Hat Order Form. We’ll be closing the order form within the next couple of weeks and we’ll send them on the truck to your site a little later this summer. Stay tuned!

Delivery #2, Week of June 2, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

Hello from all of us at a still-wet Windflower Farm!

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • ‘Tropicana’ lettuce (green leaf) or red leaf lettuce
  • ‘Red Russian’ kale
  • ‘Prize’ bok choy
  • ‘Crunchy King’ radishes
  • Baby bunched red or yellow onions
  • Potted ‘Prospera Red’ basil 
  • News from the farm

On Friday of last week, in one spectacular day, three of our staff planted ‘Panisse’ and ‘Tropicana’ lettuce, ‘Red Russian’ kale, ‘Giant of Italy’ parsley and ‘Prospera’ basil, some 15,000 plants in all. And two more stellar employees, along with my son Nate, planted sweet potatoes, another 8,000 plants, or slips as they are called, making for a Windflower Farm one-day planting record. And then it rained, with nearly 3” falling before it was over.

There is much to be said for farming on high ground, and it is more than just the view. Our fields are usually quick to dry out. Still, runoff from a neighbor’s fields, which are even higher than ours, flowed between newly mulched beds of eggplants and chiles, producing nearly enough whitewater to kayak. Friends of ours who farm on both sides of the Tomhannock Creek had over 3” of rain and now cannot cross the ford to tend their crops on the far side of the creek. Weather, that fickle managing partner of our farm, has been particularly out of step with the plans we lesser partners have made for this season.

Next week, we expect to send purple kohlrabi, arugula, lettuce, kale, a mustard mix, radishes, and onions. Next to come from our fields will be cucumbers, squashes, garlic scapes and broccolini, but not until the weather becomes more of a team player.

Best wishes, Ted

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 #2, December 14, 2024

Winter News from Windflower Farm

Warm holiday greetings from all of us at Windflower Farm! Your second box of the winter season will arrive this Saturday. Delivery details can be found below.

What you’ll get this month

  • ‘Rangitoto’ spinach and ‘Red Russian’ kale from our winter greenhouses
  • A bagful of sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes
  • A sprig of Rosemary
  • A butternut squash (from friends at Denison Farm)
  • A bagful of yellow onions and ‘Ed’s Red’ Dutch shallots
  • A bagful of carrots and beets
  • Honey from Derek Woodcock at Harry’s Honey Patch
  • ‘Honeycrisp’ and ‘Jonagold’ apples and ‘Bosc’ pears from the Borden Farm

News from the farm

I am writing at the end of the day on Thursday of winter share week. We’ve just wrapped up harvesting your greens and packaging all that will go into your second winter box. It was a cold, windy and sunny day, and I am grateful to have been harvesting greens in the relative warmth of a greenhouse. The quality of our spinach has never been better. Salvador and Candelaria are spending the holiday season in Mexico, so we were a team of five. We managed to harvest about 300 lb. of spinach from three beds, giving us enough to fill a 12-oz bag for each one of our winter share members, and the three kale beds that we harvested produced a bunch for everyone. We do not wash your greens in the winter, but you should wash them at home with cold water and then spin dry prior to storing them in your refrigerator.

It rained all day yesterday, giving us nearly two inches of much needed rainfall. Hydrologists have said that 9” are needed to restore aquifers to normal levels, so we have a start. For those of us who like to ski, it is sad to think that the unusually deep early powder has just been washed away, but it’s only early December and I’ve been fortunate enough to have enjoyed several days with friends in the Vermont backcountry.

A note on the potato and sweet potato bag – these vegetables have not been washed either. They’ll keep best if they’re stored as they are in a cool place. If potatoes are kept too warm for too long they will sprout. The sweet potatoes are ‘Covingtons’ and the potatoes are ‘Peter Wilcox’ (if dark blue) or ‘French Fingerling’ (if red and oblong).

The ‘Bosc’ pears in your box will appear somewhat shriveled because, at this late point in the season, they have become slightly dehydrated in storage. I have found them to still be good to eat.

Here is a link to a winter CSA article that offers numerous tips regarding the care and handling of your vegetables. https://bittmanproject.com/winter-csas/

Wishing you and yours a healthy and happy holiday season, Ted, Jan, Nate, Andrea and Jason