Volume 22, Week 20
Full share &🥞yellow🥞 half shares
218 Gates Avenue between Classon and Franklin
(IMPACCT Brooklyn at the Gibbs Mansion)
5:00 to 7:30 pm
Please take a moment to fill out the 2023 Member Survey - your feedback is important to us and helps us plan for future seasons!
Sign up for Winter Shares
Winter shares are going FAST! You can find out more information and register for a winter share using this link: Windflower Farm's 2023-2024 Winter Share (wufoo.com). The deadline for signing up is November 1st or until we reach our limit.
A few winter share FAQs -
Winter distributions occur MONTHLY on Saturdays - November 18, December 16, and January 6th at 345 Waverly Place (NOT 218 Gates!)
You can add Davis Farm egg and maple shares, and Hickory Wind Farm grain shares to your winter share using the above wufoo form. Other extra shares will be announced shortly and will have separate sign ups.
Winter deliveries are timed to coincide with the deliveries made to your CSA pickup site by Pleasant Valley Farm.
Help needed for Halloween workshifts
Seeking ghosts, goblins, ghouls, or just plain clothes CHCSA members to sign-up for the Halloween Party Set-up Shift from 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM on Thursday 10/26! Help us get our spooky dishes out and serve them up to CSA members. This 2 hour shift counts towards fulfilling your membership work shift commitment for the season. Sign up here: https://signup.com/go/bPPxVHh.
Bring a dish to our Halloween potluck
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!
Two special pop ups this week!
For the yellow members who missed them last week - Fort Greene Granola will be back on site this week with bags of their original and seasonal spiced granola! And Jess from Olamina Botanicals will be back with some seasonal herbal blends and remedies for members to purchase and stock up for the cold/flu/allergy season ahead.
Reminder - Pleasant Valley Farm delivers next week
Place your orders by 8am on Wednesday 10/18. Take a look at their offerings here!
This week’s share
Sweet potatoes
Yellow onions
Green ‘Tropicana’ lettuce
Arugula
Radishes
Braising greens
Chiles
Sweet peppers
Eggplants
Tomatoes
Denison Farm Carrots
Fruit: Yonder Farm’s Ambrosia apples
extras: maple, grain, mushrooms, bread, eggs, granola!
News from Windflower Farm
It’s time for squirrels to stash their nuts and chipmunks to batten the hatches on their winter nests - the cold season is coming. We have been tucking vegetables into various corners of our barns for the winter.
Winter share news
Our winter share consists of three deliveries of organic greens, vegetables, and fruits made between late November and early January. We started transplanting the greens that will go into the winter share today, a Columbus Day Weekend tradition. When all is done, we expect to have planted 12 beds in six ‘caterpillar’ tunnels and 15 beds in three high tunnels, including three types of lettuce, plus tatsoi, bok choy, two kale varieties and spinach. The storage vegetables in the winter share will come from our farm (potatoes, beets, sweet potatoes, cabbages, red and yellow onions, shallots, and leeks) and our friends at Denison farm (butternut squash, carrots, and celeriac). The fruits (apples primarily, and pears if I can find any) will come from Yonder Farm and the Bordens. Each month, we’ll include a sweet treat of some kind, including fresh, sweet apple cider, local honey, and local jam. Optional shares of eggs, maple products and grains are available, too. We hope you’ll join us for the winter share. More information and a signup page can be found by following this link: Windflower Farm's 2023-2024 Winter Share (wufoo.com).
News from the farm
Wind and a cold rain are taking our leaves before they’ve had a chance to fully turn. This year’s colors, at least in our part of the Hudson Valley, have been muted, but they are still lovely, and likely at their peak. The rain has just stopped, the sun has come out, and Jan and Nate have run outside to see the unusually bright double rainbow that has emerged from the gloom.
Nate and I planted nearly half the farm to a cover crop of rye last week, and the rainfall couldn’t have come at a better time. We’ll plant three or four more acres to rye this week, and we’ll make a final planting once we wrap up the vegetable harvest at the end of the month. Friends at Hickory Ridge Farm and The Farm at Miller’s Crossing are the sources of the organic cover crop seeds we’ve used. Some of it contains a quantity of hairy vetch seed, a nitrogen fixing legume. As often happens when working the fields, a red-tailed hawk followed the tractor I was operating, hunting a white-footed field mouse or rabbit the disc might send running.
An independent organic certification inspector named David, who hails from Vermont and lives in his Ford van, came to the farm last week to conduct our annual inspection. The audit took half the time of last year’s and went off without a hitch, at least as far as I could tell. We’ll get a final notice from PCO, our certifier, in a week or two.
I’ll keep you posted, Ted