Volume 21, Week 12
Full share & 🍋 yellow 🍋 half shares
218 Gates Avenue between Classon and Franklin
(IMPACCT Brooklyn at the Gibbs Mansion)
5:00 to 7:30 pm
It’s the second half of the season!
Follow us on Instagram and send us your food pix! We want to see what you’re doing with your shares!
Swap Box: You may have noticed we've added a swap box, now that members are picking their own produce from bins. The swap box is a longstanding Clinton Hill CSA tradition, and this is how it works: Like peppers but can't stand tomatoes? Leave your tomatoes in the swap box and pick up anything that's in there, from peppers to zucchini. We only ask that you don't take anything from the swap box without leaving something in return. As a reminder, all leftover produce, including whatever is in the swap box, is donated at the end of the evening.
Worth checking out - a newsletter for farmshare people! The Farm Share Newsletter is a weekly mailing of recipes and tips, compiled by Alexandra Stafford, a member of the Roxbury Farm CSA in Columbia County NY - subscribe for more ideas for your weekly shares!
This week’s share
Kale mix
Bok Choy
Red Gold potatoes
Basil
Sweet corn!!
Tomatoes
Garlic
Onions
Sweet peppers
Eggplant
Fruit: Windflower blueberries or cantaloupes from Hand Melon Farm
Extras: mushrooms, eggs, and bread!
Attn: fruit people: The authorities have told us it is no longer permissible to reuse pint and quart containers. We request that you recycle your berry boxes at home.
News from Windflower Farm
Distribution #12 - Week of August 23, 2022
What’s new on the farm?
How my fellow vegetable farmers manage to make a living by working the land has always interested me. Early on, I wondered if one could still actually farm full-time for a living or whether an outside income was necessary. The first farmer I worked for, it turned out, earned most of his living selling pot. What other crops are profitable, I wondered? Here is the story of a man who has inspired me and one of the most entrepreneurial farmers I know.
A friend of mine, Guy Jones, from Blooming Hill Farm, one of the founding farmers at the Union Square Greenmarket, had for a time made most of his income by growing and selling gourmet salad mixes, or mesclun, as it was called then, each leaf hand-picked and triple rinsed. He was among the first to add nasturtiums and chervil and a host of other herbs to his beautiful and aromatic mixes. But as everyone got into the business, prices came down and he had to find new opportunities.
He found them in cut flowers. First, it was avant-garde arrangements featuring juniper branches and other unlikely wild cuttings. But then he found something special. I was reminded of Guy on a recent bike ride along a stretch of nearby swamp. There they were: cattails, Boneset, Joe Pieweed, and the invasive Purple Loosestrife, all in their prime. Guy and his team handled them just right, they made cuts on the diagonal, transferred them to clean water and buckets back at the farm so that they’d last, placed them in floral sleeves and kept them cool until market day. And he sold them by the hundreds, and quite possibly the thousands, a bit of the countryside brought to the city. I think he built his farm on that wildflower bouquet. And the beauty of it was that he didn’t have to sow a seed or pull a weed – he’d just load his team and a heap of buckets into his van and head to the nearest swamp. And they could be harvested sustainably, so long as they were not overharvested, and for as long as swampland continued to be regarded by developers as wasteland.
I was with Guy and another friend in the audience when Wendell Berry, after giving a talk about the joys of farming in his beloved Kentucky, asked the farming audience for their greatest sources of joy or hardship. “Farming is hard!” said someone. Guy stood up with his large round face, long blond ponytail, the elder amongst us, and shouted out, “Making payroll!” which is something he’d been doing for 25 years by that time. I still don’t know which it was for him - joy or hardship.
I farmed near Guy for a few years when I worked with a dozen homeless men in a recovery program, and he gave me a great deal of advice in those early days. Most valuable might have been this: “Ted, farming, like most things, is mostly about showing up. Get up early, bring your best ideas, and get to work.” As Guy has stepped back from the farm, his three sons have stepped in to take the farm through its next iteration: a farm-to-table restaurant, CSA and wedding venue. The entrepreneurial spirit has clearly passed to the next generation.
Have a great week, Ted
