Volume 23, Week 3

Full share & 🍀green🍀half shares

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

Windflower Farm Tours are back!!!

Windflower Farm Tours: After a 5 (!!) year hiatus, Windflower Farm weekend is back, and this time they’re celebrating 25 years of farming! The open house will take place June 29th and 30th. A reservation is required for our planning purposes, and the deadline is June 16th. - that’s this Sunday!

What to expect: You will be able to meet some of the farm team, join Ted for a tour of the farm, and enjoy community and conversation with other CSA members over a potluck dinner and a light breakfast. Breakfast will be self-serve and will include light fare such as baked goods, granola, yogurts, cold dishes, coffee and tea. Members are welcome to camp out in our hayfield on Saturday night or book lodgings in nearby hotels, motels, Airbnbs, and inns. Spend your time on the farm playing games, sitting by the bonfire, and taking in the beautiful setting, or venture out to visit a local winery, swim or rent a kayak or canoe, or check out Jazz Fest in Saratoga Springs!

More information and a schedule of events can be found in the signup form. Please register by Sunday, June 16th. Hope to see you there!

To help you get in the farm spirit -

Nate has put together a 20-minute film about the farm, and it can be found at Windflower Farm CSA (youtube.com).

Announcements for Week 3

  • Bring bags! Some items may be bunched or packed in plastic, but you will need tote bags to bring your share home! We’ll have a limited number of Clinton Hill CSA (new colors: rust and periwinkle!) totes available for sale for $10 - cash and venmo accepted!

  • Work Shift Reminder: Members with full vegetable shares are required to complete 2 two-hour work shifts, for a total of four hours. Members with half vegetable shares must complete 1 two-hour work shift. Sign up for your 2024 work shifts here! For those who find volunteering on site to be a problem, we may have other opportunities. Please email volunteer@clintonhillcsa.org for more information.

  • A note about payment: We thank everyone who has made payments early and helped to support Windflower Farm and all our other suppliers of wonderful produce. We encourage you to check your inboxes and make sure you're up to date with payments. Remember that with some extra shares, like bread, mushrooms, or medicinal herbs, your invoices may not all come from Windflower Farm, so be sure you're opening the emails that tell you how to pay for your share. And on behalf of Windflower Farm and our other CSA suppliers, thank you!

This week’s share

  • Summer squash or zucchini or cucumbers

  • Kohlrabi

  • Green frilly cutting lettuce

  • Swiss Chard

  • Redleaf kale

  • Onions

  • Garlic scapes

  • Fruit: Strawberries from Yonder Farm

  • Extras: eggs, bread, granola, plus another pop up from Felicia and Domingo coffee! Maple and grain shares will have their first delivery next week!

News from Windflower Farm

Distribution No. 3, Week of June 10, 2024

Cold weather has slowed our squashes and cucumbers, but they are coming along. I think they’ll really begin to produce fruit in week #4, following the heat that is expected later this week.

Progress report: Last week, we planted 24,000 sweet potato slips, four 350’ beds of eggplants, our tenth sweet pepper tunnel, and chiles. We hilled potatoes, cultivated cabbage and broccoli, and trellised cucumbers and tomatoes growing in greenhouses. And, because it had become dry, we irrigated virtually the entire farm (just in time for a good rain).

Our goal for this week is to finish transplanting winter squashes - the acorns, butternuts, delicatas and pie pumpkins that will arrive in your fall shares. We also want to plant a third succession of sweet corn, a second round of cabbage, and more lettuce, radicchio, kale and other greens. And we want to figure out how to use a new tool - a weeder for mulched crops called a “trim cone” that a man from Wisconsin made for us.

The biggest project on the horizon, and one we won’t get to until next week, is hand weeding onions. We have perhaps an acre of them, or some twenty-four 350’ beds, on bare ground. We are not fans of agricultural plastic, although we make use of it where necessary, and have opted to avoid it in the case of our fall onion crop. The downside is that, if we cannot keep up with tractor cultivation, as has become the case this year, the weeds will get away from us. It has become an all-hands situation. 

The upside of a weeding chore like this one is that it provides the conditions for good conversation. “Getting into the weeds” has its origins in the garden. The work is easy, if sometimes hot and buggy. And it’s gratifying - progress is gauged by looking back down the beds, and because we work in a pack, progress is rapid. All that’s left is for someone to begin talking. When a former employee returns for a visit, we are invariably taken back to a crop in desperate need of weeding, the group of us who took it on, and what we talked about.

Have a great week, Ted

 
Veronica