Volume 22, Week 21
Full share & šgreenš half shares
218 Gates Avenue between Classon and Franklin
(IMPACCT Brooklyn at the Gibbs Mansion)
5:00 to 7:30 pm
Please take our 2023 Member Survey!
Your feedback is very important to us, and helps us plan for future seasons. Please take a moment to fill out our (brief) member survey - we want to know what you think!
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!
One more pop up this week!
For those who missed them last week - 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.
This weekās share
Yellow wax beans
Assorted potatoes
Rosemary
Garlic (the Denisonās āsecondsā)
āBoleroā carrots
āBoroā beets
Red cabbage
Salad mix (mixed mustard greens)
Winterbor kale
āMagentaā lettuce
Fruit: Yonder Farmās āEmpireā apples (this is the last fruit share of the season!)
extras: bread, eggs, granola, Pleasant Valley Farm goodies
News from Windflower Farm
Youāll find an online Windflower Farm CSA survey attached to this newsletter. Please help us to be the best CSA we can be by taking five or ten minutes to fill it out. 2023 CSA SURVEY (wufoo.com)
Itās been a busy week here at the farm. Although the weather has been pleasant for October, with no hard freeze in sight, the place still has a mad dash feel. The winter greens have all been planted, hooped, and covered. So too for the overwintering onion plants. But numerous beds of leeks, beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, cabbages, beans, and greens remain to be harvested. We still have a half-acre or so of onion sets and garlic cloves to plant and to mulch. We have perhaps five more acres to sow to cover crops. And we have over a dozen small greenhouses to clean up and ready for winter.
It is inevitable that cold weather will come, hence much of the urgency. But there is also the fact that our staff will be heading out of town soon. I will be purchasing airplane tickets for four members of the Medina household this afternoon. Candelaria, Daniel, Martin, and Miriam all plan to spend the winter in Guanajuato, Mexico. One day Iāll surprise them by purchasing a fifth ticket and tagging along, but not this time. Nate and I are excited about some projects we have planned for our workshop. And we bought ski passes at Bromley, the local mountain where farmers from throughout southern New England go to ski and to trade tips about new vegetable varieties, pest controls or staffing. Itās tempting to write the pass off as a business expense.
Next weekās vegetable delivery will be your last of the regular season. This one is the last for odd-week members. Iām not entirely sure what weāll send next week, but it will likely include herbs, leeks, fennel, sweet potatoes, beets, and red onions, along with some escarole, braising greens, and kale. Oh, and more of Brianās āsecondsā garlic. Thanks very much for being with us.
I was at a memorial service at the rural cemetery down the hill from our house. Everyone from the community was there. I talked with a neighboring vegetable farmer about the farm season. āItās been a rough year,ā he said, and then showed me the scar he received from a run in with a piece of farm machinery. He then proceeded to tell me that he was going to quit farming. It wasnāt any one thing, he said, mentioning the labor challenge, the rains, the low pay, his back. His heart just wasnāt in it anymore. What will you do, I asked. He wasnāt sure, but he knew he was going to have a very large garden. And I reminded him that he had 2000 onion bulbs up at my place ready to plant.
Winter share news
We hope youāll 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). In short, our winter share consists of three deliveries of organic greens, vegetables, and fruits made between late November and early January. We finished transplanting the greens that will go into the winter share last week, including 12 beds in six ācaterpillarā tunnels and 15 beds in three high tunnels, to 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, weāll 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. Consider joining us.
Take care, Ted