Full share & 🐛 green🐛 half shares

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

Halloween is around the corner…

Once again, the Clinton Hill CSA is celebrating Halloween in style! The last distribution of the season on October 26th will also be our Halloween party: expect costumes, decorations, pumpkins, and our annual potluck - we'd love it if you could bring a treat! You can sign up at the sign-in table or via this google form to let us know what you're bringing - thanks for you help making the CSA super-spooky!

Big Reuse will be back tonight!

For those who missed it last week, we’ll once again be joined by some friends from Big Reuse (if you haven’t been to their warehouse in Gowanus - check it out! A+ thrifting and architectural salvage), in partnership with NYC Department of Sanitation, to talk to us about curbside composting, which begins borough-wide in Brooklyn on October 2! They’ll have compost and leaf bags to give away, and can help you get set up for composting in your building.

Help - we need bags!

Do you have any reusable bags you'd like to get rid of? If so - please bring them to pickup this week! We like to have extra bags on hand for folks who forget theirs. Please no plastic bags!

Also - if you have a friend picking up your share, remind them they’ll need tote bags!

Sign up for work shifts - only 5 weeks left in the season!

Believe it or not, we’re in the final third of our CSA summer season. If you haven’t already, please sign up for work shifts today! As a reminder: all CSA members who complete their required work shift hours (4 hours for full shares, 2 hours for half shares) will be entered in a raffle at the end of the season! If you have any questions about fulfilling your work hours, please reach out to volunteer@clintonhillcsa.org

This week’s share

Green beans
Lettuce
Spinach
Eggplant
Tomatoes
Sweet peppers
Acorn squash
Chiles
Fruit: Yonder Farms’ ‘Zestar’ and ‘Golden Supreme’ apples
Extras: eggs, bread, granola

News from Windflower Farm

We harvested just four 20-bushel totes of winter squash. There are perhaps two more in the field. If we include pie pumpkins, this harvest might provide shares for two weeks. Disappointing. Last year, we harvested 320 bushels from a similar sized planting. The side-by-side fields we chose had low spots at their centers, and the rainy summer resulted in standing water that never subsided. We'll send them all right away. And then, in this upside-down season, we'll resume sending summer squash. Jan thinks the winter squash might best be used as additions to things: added to chili or to tacos, for example, or included in a medley of root vegetables. She says to use them right away – they won’t keep. I think you may also need to be liberal with brown sugar.

In better news, we began harvesting sweet potatoes on Thursday and they look good. They're pretty, good-sized, and richly colored. We'll begin the curing process right away - eighty degrees and 100 percent humidity for ten days – which helps their starches turn into sugars. The Ag & Markets food safety team came to inspect our farm last Thursday, and we spent most of our time talking about how to grow good sweet potatoes in the Northeast. We passed the inspection with an 'A', by the way. Kristoffer made the observation that if they had witnessed shortcomings related to our food handling protocols, we wouldn’t have talked much about sweet potatoes.

You would not guess how my new delivery truck got its first dent. There are so many ways a truck might get a dent in the city, but this one was unexpected. Don and Daniel were driving along Bergen Street in Brooklyn, moving slowly because of someone on a bicycle ahead of them. This made the driver of the car behind them furious. He honked his horn, he waved his hands, gesticulating exactly how you might imagine. And then, at the light at the end of the block, he charged out of his car and pounded his fist on the door of the truck. He was a big man and it scared the hell out of Don and Daniel. And it left a fist-sized dent in the middle of the driver's side door. Oh, brother!

It seems to have happened quickly - we are in the season's final quarter. Summer vegetables are winding down. Soon, our eggplants, peppers and tomatoes will give out. We have already begun to rip out some of the underperformers. At the first sign of cold, our summer squash will also be done. The same for beans and corn. But greens and the roots, bulbs and tubers of fall are still ahead. Next week, we'll send lettuce, kale, potatoes, Rosemary, carrots, onions, and squashes of some sort.

Have a great week!

Ted

Recipes

You heard the man (Ted) - cook that squash TONIGHT - here are a bunch of ideas! Also - discover the strengths and weaknesses of each apple variety, and learn which are best for pie, sauce, crisps, and eating raw!

Did you know? Our website has recipes, food storage tips, and information about the vegetables you might come across in your share!

Volume 22, Week 17