THE BEET: VOLUME 19; WEEK 11
FULL SHARE & YELLOW HALF SHARE
PICK UP TONIGHT
5pm–7:30pm at JACK Theater
18 Putnam Ave (between Grand and Downing)
Please wear a mask and practice social distancing!
TONIGHT! The LES Ecology Center is celebrating 30 years of community-based composting with a virtual picnic! With city programs on hold, it's more important than ever to support community composting operations. Buy a ticket or make a donation here!
And on the topic of community based composting - here's a New York Times article on some of the grassroots composting operations that emerged after city programs lost funding.
ALSO TONIGHT! Just Food, a food justice organization and supporter of NYC CSAs, is offering a series of trainings this month: Food Equity: The Building Blocks of Cultivating Neighborhood Resiliency. This series is made possible from funding from the NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene. In the 4 unique sessions are an hour and half starting at 6PM EDT:
Tuesday, Aug 18 Session One: Emergent Solutions: Understanding how to build resiliency in your community food system
Thursday, Aug 20 Session Two: Building a Brooklyn strong regional food value chain & economy
Tuesday Aug 25 Session Three: What is Vital in a Brooklyn Based Food Hub?
Thursday Aug 27 Session Four: People Power in City Government
To register, please go to www.justfood.org/trainings
AND THIS WEEK - place your Lewis Waite orders for delivery with next Thursday's share! Click here to browse their selection of pastured, grass fed meats, and tons of other items from local farms. When you create an account, select "Clinton Hill" from the "shopping for" drop down menu. Place your order by 8am Wednesday, August 26, for delivery with your share on Thursday, August 27!
The News from Windflower Farm
Distribution #11 - Week of August 17, 2020
Greetings from Windflower Farm. Shorter days and cooler nights signal the start of the school year. Our farm staff is smaller by one this week. Mallory, who started here when she was 14, is off to begin her freshman year in college. Two other student workers will leave soon, but their schedules remain hazy. We’ll miss them when they go.
What’s in your share?
Sweet corn
Tomatoes
Basil
Peppers
Cucumbers (or squash)
Cabbage (or eggplant)
Lacinato kale (or lettuce)
Onions
Garlic
Your basil was greenhouse grown because we were afraid that downy mildew would have killed it in the field. There is more to come. One goal will be to learn how to scale it up so that there is enough in the share for a batch of pesto. Your fruit share will be our own melons.
What’s new on the farm?
We have always farmed organically. Passersby know this because our fields are a little weedier than those absolutely weed-free corn fields in our neighborhood. That those fields are made weed-free by applications of a pre-emergent herbicide represent one of the differences between organic and conventional agriculture. We have a number of good tools in our weed management toolbox, but none are as effective as the herbicides used by my neighbors, and I find myself at times to be a little envious. In the past, we had worked with a group called Certified Naturally Grown for our organic certification. This year, we switched teams so that we would be certified under the national rule, which is more widely accepted, and we received our new certificate in the mail this week.
One of the key differences under this new rulebook is that so-called biodegradable plastic mulches are not allowed. It is suspected that they contain petroleum additives that are not good for soil health despite their use in Canadian and European organics. Only truly plastic mulches can be used in the states, and we’ll have to send any plastic mulches we do use to a landfill when we’re finished with them. This will certainly motivate us to try to eliminate those products altogether. Another key difference is that the paper trail required to enable a bonafide third party audit of an organic farm is substantial, and participation in the process has required us to make some changes to our record keeping system. Both of these changes – reducing the use of plastics and keeping better records - will make us a better farm business.
This week, we’ll wrap up our yellow onion harvest and begin on reds and shallots, vegetables that I enjoy growing and that our farm seems well suited to. Which brings me to a subject we are thinking out loud about. We have begun talking with other CSA farmers in the region about taking a more collaborative approach to producing what goes into your weekly shares. For the twenty years we have been a CSA, we have grown almost everything that we have sent. But we have come to believe that your shares (and our work lives) might be enhanced with a little selective vegetable crop swapping.
To that end, we are considering working with a small handful of experienced (and certified) organic farmers who would provide us with the kinds of vegetables that they grow particularly well, and we, in turn, would grow more of the kinds of crops that we do well and send those to their CSA members. We might grow more onions or tomatoes or squashes, for example, and trade them for early carrots or cucumbers or summer lettuce. In this way, we might more reliably offer to our CSA membership more of those vegetables that are difficult for us to grow. The benefit for us is that we’d eliminate a few challenging crops, enabling us to grow more of those vegetables we grow well. I share this because I’m curious to know what you think about this idea. Please feel free to drop me a line.
Have a great week, Ted
Recipes
We're planning for all possible outcomes! In the event we get cabbage in our shares, try making your own sauerkraut. If we get eggplant, try this warm pasta salad with roasted vegetables, feta, and basil. And if you've never made dumplings before, this tutorial for summer vegetarian dumplings is quite thorough, and includes variations using summer squash AND cucumber.
Visit our website for more recipes, storage tips, and information.