Volume 25, Week 4

Full share & 🌼yellow🌼 half shares

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

Act now: order a Windflower hat :)

This week only: Order your Windflower Farm ball caps. They will be delivered next week and the week after. The link is here: https://windflowerfarm.wufoo.com/forms/windflower-farms-hat-order-form.

Once more for the yellow week people: Spice pop up from Sourcery at today’s distribution

Hi! I'm Bhavna -- a Fort Greene neighbor and founder of Sourcery, a Brooklyn-based spice company that works directly with small family farms and tribal foragers in South Asia. I bring in spices seasonally -- harvested fresh, shipped directly from the farm, and packaged here in New York. I started Sourcery 3 years ago, inspired by memories of cooking with my grandmother in India and I couldn't find anything close to those flavors here. The reality is that grocery store spices are often 5+ years old and have lost all their flavor by the time they reach you.

I'm excited to share these beautiful, aromatic spices with the Clinton Hill CSA community and offer a monthly spice pickup for folks who want to cook with them! 

Here is how the ordering system and pickup process will work:

Members can place ala carte orders throughout the month, and deliveries will be made June 25, July 30, August 27, September 24, and October 29.

HOW TO ORDER

1. Make your selections via ClintonHillCSA Spices Website

2. At check out, choose the pickup option and select “Clinton Hill CSA”

3. Make your payment 

4. Your spices will be delivered on the next upcoming date!

This week’s share

Today is our first maple delivery - if you ordered a maple share, be sure to pick yours up!

  • Two heads of lettuce

  • Red Ruffles kale

  • Chinese cabbage

  • Kohlrabi bulbs or sweet white turnips or radishes

  • Cucumbers

  • Potted basil or garlic scapes

  • Happy Rich broccolini

  • Zucchini or summer squash

  • Fruit: Strawberries from Yonder Farm

  • Extras: eggs, bread, and maple syrup!

News from Windflower Farm

Delivery #4, June 25, 2026

My grandfather farmed in Rock Island County, Illinois. His black prairie soils were level and deep and stone free and nearly the opposite of the rolling, stoney land on which we grow your vegetables. He is one of a score of people with whom I have an ongoing conversation about the craft of farming. Today, our topic is bed preparation. In his day, prior to seeding, a farmer would first plow, then disc. The seeder would be outfitted with a fertilizer hopper and a way to deposit fertilizer in a band next to the seeds. Straightforward and efficient. He would also have had a crop rotation that would have included not just corn and soybeans, but also oats and wheat, which would help with fertility, pests and weeds. Final weed control would be accomplished with cultivators in the old days, and then, following the war, with herbicides. If he were farming today, I wonder, would he be a no-till farmer?

Granddad has been gone for a long time – so I carry on both sides of our conversation. Still, I wonder how he would have dealt with our hills and stones? My rows are not as straight as his were. Hill farming is to farm on the contour, in curving rows. In our case, because we use permanent beds (an idea from another farmer with whom I talk regularly), we can forgo plowing. We first apply compost and any other soil amendments and then form raised beds using a disc shaper. Although we’ve been able to eliminate the plow, what we do is far from no-till farming, which is largely herbicide dependent. Still, we try to minimize tillage to reduce our carbon footprint, and we use cover crops to build soil organic matter. Today, I was incorporating the debris of a rye-clover-hairy vetch cover crop into raised beds. It was my second time through the field – the first was made two weeks ago - and this time the beds would be ready for planting. And, because they would be on a hillside, they would be curvy. I like to think that granddad would be fine with that.  

Best wishes, Ted   

 
Veronica