Volume 25, Week 17
Full share & 🍐green🍐 half shares
218 Gates Avenue between Classon and Franklin
(IMPACCT Brooklyn at the Gibbs Mansion)
5:00 to 7:30 pm
Celebrate 25 years of the Clinton Hill CSA!
Yes, it’s true, we’ve been around for a quarter century!
To honor this amazing milestone, we’re throwing a potluck party during CSA pickup on Thursday October 8th.
Bring a dish, mingle with members, and bring the kids - we’ll have games and activities for them as well!
Want to bring a dish to the potluck? Click here to sign up.
Feeling crafty? Sign up here to help decorate the space.
This week’s share
Tomatoes
Sweet Peppers or summer squash
Chilis
Yellow and red onions
Assorted lettuces
Kale
Spinach
Acorn squash
Rosemary
Adirondack Red potatoes
Leeks
Fruit: Yonder Farm’s Stanley plums
Extras: Eggs, bread, mushrooms
News from Windflower Farm
Delivery #17, September 24, 2026
Before AI agents threatened humanity, there was Phytophthora.
Few pathogens cover as much ground in the plant kingdom as the genus Phytophthora. Some 200 different species are infected by the pathogen. P. infestans, for example, causes late blight in tomato and the notorious potato blight that played a central role (along with British policy) in the horrific Irish famine of 1845-1852. Phytophthora is a water mold, and it thrives during wet growing seasons when puddles or mud exist long enough for the mold to transition from its resting stage to its infectious stage. It is one of the reasons we grow most of our tomatoes and peppers under cover. The ‘infestans’ in the name derives from the idea that it is an invader and destroyer of plants. Thankfully, the pathogen is an infrequent visitor to the Northeast, and although it is presently on farms in Vermont, it has arrived too late to be of consequence here.
Phytophthora capsici, a cousin of P. infestans and another water mold, causes peppers (Capsicum annuum) to melt away. A pepper fruit can appear to be perfect going into the harvest basket one day and be soft and moldy the next. It is why we fear persistent rainfall during harvest windows. Winter squashes are also frequent victims of P. capsici, and it seems to have found a foothold in the puddles between beds of our pie pumpkins and our delicata and acorn squashes. They were large and appeared healthy going into our barn three weeks ago, and all but enough squash to send last week and this week have melted away. Obviously, we are very disappointed. Squash bugs played a role in all of this. Toward harvest time, they were present in large numbers, small bugs arranged in little platoons of ten or twenty following their larger platoon leaders from plant to plant. They no doubt hastened the spread of the infectious spores from fruit to fruit on their little feet. An effective organic spray does not exist. Just two fields over, and on higher ground, our butternuts have yielded a bumper crop and appear to be free of the disease. We harvested them yesterday, ahead of today’s forecasted rain and before the squash bugs arrived looking for another field in which to spread the disease. While we try to learn whatever lesson this experience has to offer, we’ll cross our fingers that the butternuts remain healthy.
In happier news, sweet potatoes will have been curing for a week by the time you read this. They’ll need another week before enough of their starches have converted to sugar to be good to eat, and then we will send them to you. Look for them in week #18 or 19. Half of the crop has been harvested as of this writing. We hope to get the other half in the barn by the end of the week.
Best wishes, Ted