Volume 22, Week 10

Full share & 🧽 yellow 🧽 half shares

218 Gates Avenue between Classon and Franklin
(IMPACCT Brooklyn at the Gibbs Mansion)
5:00 to 7:30 pm

Reminder about work shifts!

We need your help to keep things running smoothly!

All Clinton Hill CSA members with full vegetable shares are required to complete two two-hour work shifts during the season. Members with half vegetable shares complete one two-hour work shift. This is a great opportunity to learn more about how your CSA works, and to get to know other members! Your work shift is a commitment that you agree to when you sign up, and households that do not complete their shifts may not be able to join again in the future. Children are welcome on site when their parents are doing their work shift commitment; our youngest members can be very helpful, and we only ask that you bring snacks and other things to keep them busy. 

If you haven’t fulfilled your work shift hours this season, we urge you to sign up soon! For those who find volunteering on site to be a problem, we may have other opportunities for you - please email volunteer@clintonhillcsa.org for more information.

But wait - there’s more -

All members who have fulfilled their work shifts (or signed up for winter work shifts) by the end of the season will have their name entered in a raffle for a chance to win local goodies from Pleasant Valley Farm!

This week’s share

  • Tomatoes

  • Basil

  • Eggplant

  • Sweet corn

  • Kale

  • Greene Romaine lettuce or Green Oakleaf lettuce

  • Bunched beets

  • Squash

  • Fruit: Windflower blueberries

  • Extras: mushrooms, bread, eggs, granola :)

To stay ahead of downy mildew, we are growing basil in pots this year. We grow ‘Prospera’, a mildew resistant variety of basil, but that seems to give the plant little more than an additional week or two in the field. If you have a sunny window and a green thumb, you can keep the plant going for a while, plucking the leaves a little at a time. If not, you can use the whole plant in one shot now and toss out the soil cube. We’ll send more.

News from Windflower Farm

Flea beetles and woodchucks vie for the title of most damaging pest of Windflower Farm vegetables. They both love cabbage, broccoli, and kale, and it’s a wonder that we have any of these at all. Woodchucks also love lettuce, sweet potato vines, and squashes, and flea beetles are nuts over arugula. Like Mr. McGregor, we spend much of our time standing sentry and erecting barriers. But another four-legged creature, a little bandit, is occasionally in the running for biggest pest, and it’s about time for it to make an appearance.

If you’ve been with us for the past couple of years, you’ll know that the racoons in our neighborhood have a fondness for our sweet corn. They seem to know when it’s ready for harvest and sweep through the night before and take half of our crop. This year, we have taken extraordinary steps to keep them away, the most important of which is double electric fencing. The entire farm is enclosed within an 8-foot-tall box wire fence primarily meant to keep deer out. But racoons are excellent climbers and surely consider this nothing more than a small inconvenience.

Inside of this fence, our corn is surrounded by an 18- to 36-inch-tall woven electric fence of the kind meant to keep woodchucks and rabbits out of a garden. To touch this fence is to get an electrical shock designed to make you think twice before touching it again. And outside of this barrier is another electric fence – this one a two-strand electric fence of the sort used to keep livestock as large as sheep or cattle in a paddock. We’ve used everything short of razor wire to create what we think is an impenetrable barrier. But racoons are crafty. They are no doubt in a strategy meeting as I write. I expect a sleepless night - we plan to harvest tomorrow morning and I should find my spotlight and be standing vigil tonight.  

Have a great week, Ted

 
Veronica