Tag: Vegetables

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 #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 #5, Week of June 23, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

Reminder: there will be no delivery next week. We will resume CSA deliveries during the week of July 7th with delivery #6.

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Green oakleaf lettuce
  • Romaine lettuce
  • Purple kohlrabi
  • Red radishes
  • Summer squashes
  • Cucumbers
  • Napa cabbage or choy (from Dension Farm)
  • Red Russian kale
  • Garlic scapes
  • Onions

Lettuce and kale fare poorly in high temperatures. To preserve them, rinse them with cold water when you get home, spin or shake dry and store them cold.   

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

News from the farm

Warm season crops are beginning to come in with the arrival of summer and the season’s first heat wave. Cucumbers and squashes are starting, but quantities are limited. It’s my hope that when deliveries resume after the July Fourth weekend, we’ll have an abundance of both. One of our projects during the delivery hiatus is to transplant our second succession of these two vegetables. Experience has taught us that three or four plantings of squash, separated by a month or so, is sufficient to maintain a supply for the season. As one planting goes down, usually because of powdery mildew or another disease, the next kicks in.

Cucumbers are more difficult for us. They are susceptible to everything that infects squashes, and they are susceptible to downy mildew, which is virulent enough to cause a complete loss. New to this year’s crop plan is the addition of two varieties of cucumber with a degree of downy mildew resistance. Plant breeders have so far had success developing resistance in pickling varieties, adding two weeks to the harvest window. If all goes well, you’ll find these picklers in your shares later in the season.

Plans for the week include hand weeding the bare ground onions and herbs in what we’ve come to call the Woods Field, transplanting a block of sweet corn, seeding green and yellow wax beans, staking and trellising the sweet peppers, and buzzing all over the farm with our electric cultivators.

Other plans for the week ahead include moving Nate’s sheep to a new pasture, covering the blueberries with insect/bird netting and weeding the rest of the farm. And, time permitting, going paddling in the Adirondacks.

Be careful out there this week – it’s going to be hot!

Have a great Fourth of July, 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 #3, Week of June 9, 2025

The News from Windflower Farm

What’s in the vegetable share?

  • Red or green lettuce
  • Hakurei (sweet white) turnips
  • Red Russian Kale
  • Mixed mustard greens
  • Bunched onions
  • Garlic scapes
  • And radishes

Japanese turnips can be sliced thin and used like radishes or sauteed until caramelized in olive oil and used as a side dish. They are sweeter and less turnip-like than the traditional fall varieties. Scapes can be pureed and used like garlic in its clove form.

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

News from the farm

It continues to rain too much (more than 3 inches last week), but I’m not going to complain about it this week.

Black locusts have been in blossom this past week, which seems a little late to me and makes me wonder if the cool and wet spring has had anything to do with it. They have a sweet fragrance and an appearance resembling the white blooming horse chestnut, at least from a distance. Gardeners following the planting advice in the Farmers’ Almanac will tell you that the locust bloom indicates that it’s now safe to set out tomatoes and other frost sensitive vegetables. We planted our first tomatoes on April 25th, nearly six weeks ago, into the protected environment of a high tunnel (essentially a greenhouse without a heater) and they are now nearly shoulder high and full of small green fruits. In this cool year, tomatoes will be slow to start – look for them in CSA shares in about four weeks.

In early May, we also planted cucumbers, another frost sensitive vegetable, in a high tunnel. We conducted a trial of this last yearwith mixed results. The plants produced well at first, but they were invaded by striped cucumber beetles and went down prematurely due to a disease they carried. This year, we wrapped the entire tunnel with an insect screen and, although some beetles have found their way inside, the planting appears healthy and small fruits are getting their start. We have trained the cucumber vine to climb up a single trellis wire and they are now up to my waist. Small quantities of cucumbers should be in shares soon. Field cucumbers are about two weeks behind them.

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!