Tag: shares

Thanksgiving Share, November 22, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

Thank you for purchasing one of our (abbreviated) winter CSA shares. We’ve been working all week to get it ready. It will arrive this Saturday, November 22nd, in a 1-bushel recyclable box. Come prepared – it will be relatively heavy. And please arrive on time – the volunteers that staff the site will have other things to do with the rest of their Saturday. They will be donating any leftover boxes to needy households in the neighborhood. Please read the important information at the end of this email for details about your pick-up location and distribution window. 

What’s in the share?

  • Lacinato and Red Russian kales and Romaine lettuce
  • Beets and kohlrabi
  • Carrots (from Denison Farm)
  • Sweet potatoes and “Irish” potatoes
  • Yellow and red onions, shallots and garlic (some boxes will have extra shallots instead of garlic)
  • Delicata squash
  • Butternut squash (from Denison Farm)
  • Rosemary
  • ‘Crimson Crisp’ (the smaller, darker red) and ‘Ludicrisp’ apples (from Yonder Farm)
  • Apple cider (from Borden Farm)

News from the farm

Tomorrow morning, while we are harvesting your greens, Comfort Food Community, an organization that feeds families in need in our rural community, will be coming here to harvest greens for their own Thanksgiving boxes which are slated to go out this week and next. Last week, this group harvested hundreds of bunches of kale from our greenhouses and this week they’ll harvest bok choy, lettuce and even more kale. Some 40% of the food we produce in this country is wasted. These folks work on area farms as gleaners to feed hungry people by harvesting, packing and distributing food that might otherwise be wasted. Of course, ours is not the only farm where they work. Their harvest van can be found in fields throughout the area, with a roster of 70 partnering farms so far. CFC and its cadre of volunteer harvesters have distributed over 1 million pounds of food since 2024.

When friends at Denison Farm, the producers of the carrots and butternut squashes in your share, learned of the devastation in Jamaica from Hurricane Melissa, the Category 5 storm that ripped through the country on October 28th, they set up a GoFundMe page to help the four men from Jamaica who work for them. Like Windflower Farm, their farm is a CSA, and their membership contributed an astonishing $20,000 to help these men and their families buy the supplies needed to rebuild their homes. Errol, Walter, Tyrone and Marlon will have a lot of work to do when they get home, but this will provide an essential boost to their effort. Bad news comes at us every day of the week. I share these two stories because they remind me of the good that also goes on every day, some of it in our own backyards.

Wishing you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving and a peaceful holiday season,

Ted and the entire Windflower Farm Team

Your share will be delivered on Saturday, November 22nd. Your pick-up time and location are noted below:

Central Brooklyn CSA (1251 Dean St., 4:30 to 6:00)

Please note:

1.       A friend, family member or neighbor can pick up your share for you if you are not able to make it to distribution. Please ask this person to sign-in under your name.

2.       Site hosts are not obliged to save shares for members who miss the distribution window. Any shares leftover after distribution will be donated to community fridges or food pantries and will help other community members in need.

3.       The farm is not able to send you a make-up share if you miss a distribution. The farm will only send shares to your pick-up site on the scheduled pick-up dates.

4.     We will send you a newsletter a day or two before distribution. Please save these two emails to your preferred contacts list: windflowercsa@gmail.com and tedblomgren@gmail.com and check your SPAM folder if our newsletter does not make it into your inbox.

5.       Watch for updates from site hosts on social media. Many sites post updates about the share on Instagram and Facebook.

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 #17, Week of September 22nd, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Lettuce
  • Arugula
  • Bok Choy
  • Tomatoes
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Bunched beets
  • Yellow Onions
  • Yellow Potatoes
  • Delicata Squash

Spinach, carrots, cilantro, red onions and radicchio will be coming next week. Next week’s tomatoes may be the last of the season.

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

News from the farm

A couple of Eastern Wood Pewees are chatting away outside my window on this first day of fall. I imagine that they are discussing the drought, which is surely impacting their lives as much as it is ours. It must make finding drinking water more difficult. Is finding food more difficult, too? I’ve noticed that there are far fewer insects.   

We are fortunate in having a deep and plentiful well. It was drilled for us by Clarence Gould and his son, Clarence Jr. In return for our $6,500, they promised us 12 gallons of water per minute and ended up giving what they estimated to be a hundred. Jan spent the day with them while they drilled, which may have encouraged them to prolong their drilling. We ended up with a well that is 470’ deep and a resource that has been our salvation on more than one occasion. While our two ponds and newest well have gone dry, this one deep well keeps our greenhouses, field crops and produce packing station going. It is no exaggeration to say that without irrigation, we’d have been unable to produce a single crop this year. It’s been that dry. Yesterday, Nate irrigated Swiss chard, spinach, bok choy, kale, lettuce and arugula. Today, he irrigated two blocks of broccoli and cabbage.

It’s been a tough growing season for more than those of us who grow vegetables. Nearby dairy farmers are under stress, too – some have had to bring outside water to their herds and, because they expect declines in forage and grain production, will have to purchase additional feed. The drought is widespread. NASA has reported that the rate of drying of the Earth’s soil has accelerated worldwide. Dry places are getting dryer, while wet places are not getting wetter. Locally, the level of Lake Champlain is five feet below where it was in July. This fall, many trees are bypassing their colorful foliage stage, going directly from green to brown.

We had a first-hand peek at ground water levels here at the farm when we did some work on our well last week. Normally, ground water lies 12’ below the surface here, but now it is 16’ below ground level. We have invested nearly $3000 in cover crops seeds this year, but we’re not sure if they will germinate and so they sit in our barn unplanted. The 10-day weather forecast promises hit-or-miss showers, and we remain hopeful.

Have a great week, Ted

Delivery #13, Week of August 25, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

The heat wave broke here on Wednesday with a cool blast of wind that knocked power out for several hours. It’s been one of our hottest summers on record and has, so far, been the driest August in 150 years of record keeping, according to our network TV weather forecaster. Half an inch of rain last week, the first rainfall of the month, gave some relief to the irrigation team. But with a deficit of several inches, they are back at work.

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Spinach
  • Butterhead lettuce
  • Sweet corn
  • Sweet Peppers
  • Tomatoes
  • Basil
  • Green beans
  • Onions

The fruit share will be Denison Farm’s organic watermelons.

News from the farm

Jan, Nate and I got out to the fair on Saturday afternoon. We hadn’t been in four or five years, but we had a mission. Isaak, one of our high school-aged employees, had entered his artwork in the juried youth exhibit and had won special ribbons (and cash prizes!) for several of his pieces, including a black and white photograph of an owl, a remarkable collection of wood carvings, and a Lego farm diorama, and we wanted to see them. The kid should be in art school! Or skip school altogether and start an Etsy store. Our time at the fair included a visit to the sheep, goat and poultry exhibits and, of course, a stop at the forestry pavilion to indulge in one of the decadent maple milkshakes they serve there.

Daniel, Fabian, Miriam and Lizet, the youngest members of our field team, also went to the fair, heading straight for the blooming onions, as they do every year. Daniel told me that they were selling them for $15 per fried onion bulb and suggested that we open a booth next year!

Evan, another of our high schoolers, had entered the fair’s tractor pull earlier in the week. This is not the noisy flame and black smoke spewing tractor pull that brings contestants in from all over the Northeast (that was Saturday night’s featured event), but the garden tractor pull that features local kids and their souped-up lawn tractors. The lone rainstorm for the month of August happened to fall on the afternoon of their event, briefly turning the field into a muddy mess and the cancellation of the pull. Imagine the disappointment in working all year on your garden tractor only to have rain spoil the one day when you might have had a chance to show it off. He’s a resilient kid – I bet he’s already thinking about how to tweak his machine for next year.

We will lose our packing shed kids to school at the end of this week. Soccer and tennis had already started to call them away. I’ll miss their youthful energy and chatter and music.   

In case you are curious, we have yet to identify the disease that has plagued our cucumbers. But we have not seen the telltale sporangia that we’d expect if it is downy mildew. Is it angular leaf spot after all? Or something new? I’ll keep you posted.

Have a great week, Ted