Volume 24, Week 19

Full share & 🦚 green 🦚 half shares

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

Big news day…

Fish Share Pick Up Tonight! 𓆝 𓆟 𓆞

Folks who ordered fish - please plan to pick up between 5 and 6:30, as our fish mongers have a limited distribution window! The box will be bulky, so plan accordingly!

Winter Share Registration is OPEN!

Sign up for your winter share by November 1st! There’s only one pickup this year (more on that in Ted’s letter), but it’ll be a good one. You’ll get a big pre-packaged box containing greens, storage vegetables like onions, carrots, squash, potatoes, beets, leeks, etc, along with fruit and apple cider, just in time for Thanksgiving! As always, there’s an option to add eggs, grains, or maple products. These sell out quickly, so sign up soon!

Spice Pop Up tonight!

Bhavna, a Fort Greene neighbor and founder of Sourcery, a Brooklyn-based spice company that sources fresh, will be with us again at distribution tonight with a variety of fresh spices sourced directly from small family farms in India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, including: Black Pepper, White Pepper, Timur Pepper, Turmeric, Cuming, Coriander, Fennel, Clove, Kashmiri Chilli, Mace, Nutmeg, Black Cardamom, Green Cardamom (pictured), Ginger, Cinnamon, Jaggery, Asafoetida, Masala Chai, Smoky Chai.

Bring a dish to share at our end-of-season celebration!

As we tiptoe into October and the last few weeks of the CSA season, we still have something to look forward to: our legendary end-of-season Halloween potluck! This year, the party will be on our last pickup, on October 30th, and one day before Halloween. We’ll have fun activities for kids, including decorating their very own pumpkins, and lots of spooky decorations.

Here’s the potluck part: you can sign up to bring the dish of your choice.  Don’t forget to drop it off before 6pm so it has lots of time to be enjoyed by your fellow CSA members, and in a disposable container (unless you know you’ll be at the distribution site when we close at 7:30). 

Questions? You can reach out to the potluck organizer, Sarah Chinn, at sarahchinn67@gmail.com.

Submit your recipes!

As we move into the final weeks of our summer season, we want to know what you’ve been cooking with your Windflower fruits and veggies! Your recipe may be featured in the Beet, and if 15 minutes of CSA fame isn’t incentive enough, know this: everyone who enters will automatically be entered into a raffle to win some covetable culinary prizes!

This week’s share

  • Windflower Basil or Cilantro from Denison Farm (choice of 1)

  • Chard

  • Spinach

  • Kale 

  • Beans

  • Eggplant

  • Sweet potatoes

  • Broccoli

  • Sweet peppers

  • Leeks

  • Chiles

  • Fruit: Ginger Gold apples from Yonder Farm

  • Extras: bread, eggs, granola, fish

News from Windflower Farm

Delivery #19, week of October 6, 2025 

Maintaining a healthy and fertile soil, as you probably know, is central to the sustainability of our small farm. Our crops are only as good as the land on which they are grown. If the arugula is pale, it's likely to be lacking nitrogen. If the beans are prematurely woody, or the skin on our peppers is wrinkled, the soil was probably too dry. We work hard to try to get this right. This time of year, after harvesting leaves many of the farm's fields bare, we put much of our soil health plan into action. For Nate, that has meant sowing a blend of cover crops. Last week's rain allowed us to sink our tillage equipment into the earth to prepare the ground for planting. The cover crop blend he's sowing this week includes Medium Red clover, Hairy Vetch and cereal rye. He spins it on with the whirlybird or cyclone spreader and then runs over the ground with the cultipacker to improve seed-soil contact. We're expecting rain this week and are in a hurry to cover crop a few acres beforehand. It's our intention to have every bed on the farm covered with a soil building "green manure" crop before the season is over.

This week, we will be sending you Windflower Farm sweet potatoes. They've been in our curing chamber for the past two weeks, with the humidity set near 100% and the thermostat at 80°. I hope this has been long enough to turn the roots' starches into sugars, but it's impossible to know without eating them. They are unwashed and in a paper bag, which is a fine way of storing them. Some additional time in a warm spot in your kitchen wouldn't hurt. They’ll get sweeter with time. We'll send more sweet potatoes over the next three weeks, and then it will be the end of October and the CSA season will be over. Unless, of course, you buy a winter share.

Winter CSA Share 

For nearly 20 years, we have offered a winter CSA share, but this year's will be a little different. The drought left us with a significantly smaller fall harvest than usual. We will have just enough of a crop for only one truly bountiful delivery, and we will make it on the Saturday before Thanksgiving (November 22nd). This "Thanksgiving Share" will consist of a wide variety of storage vegetables, including butternut squash, red and yellow onions, leeks, garlic, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, and beets, plus an abundance of fresh greens (spinach, kale, lettuce) from our high tunnels, apples and cider from the Borden Farm, and optional grains, maple products and eggs from neighboring farmers. Click on the following link to learn more about this year's winter share and to register: Windflower Farm's 2025 Winter Share. We hope you’ll be able to join us.

Have a great week,

Ted

 
Veronica