Volume 25, Week 18

Full share & 🏵️ yellow🏵️ 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 (or just bring yourself!), 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.

We will also need a few extra volunteers - what a wonderful opportunity to squeeze in the last shifts of the season! Sign up for a work shift here.

Salmon pickups next week!

If you ordered salmon from Iliamna Fish, it will be ready for you at pick up next week, October 8, between 5 and 6:30! The shares are large, so plan accordingly!

This week’s share

  • Tomatoes

  • Sweet Peppers

  • Eggplants

  • Chilis

  • Cilantro

  • Onions

  • Lettuce

  • Spinach

  • Arugula

  • Yellow potatoes

  • Leeks

  • Fruit: Yonder Farm’s apples

  • Extras: Eggs, bread,

Next week, you’ll get the first of our sweet potatoes from the curing room. Sweet potato omelets from Jan’s test kitchen today tell us that they are just about ready. You’ll also get butternut squash, potatoes, garlic and onions. You’ll get a selection of greens (this is the best time of year to be a grower of greens) and you’ll get beets or carrots. We’ll spice up the final four weeks with shallots, fennel, Rosemary and cilantro.

News from Windflower Farm

Delivery #18, October 1, 2026

Now that we’re all plant pathologists (you’ll remember last week’s Phytophthora discussion), let’s talk about broccoli. I sometimes wonder if it’s a good idea to write about our crop failures. I don’t want you to go away thinking that we are hapless or worse, bumbling. But honesty and transparency are important to CSA, so I’ll tell you about another of our recent disappointments. Farming organically means deliberately limiting one’s pest control toolbox to those materials that minimize harm. Our broccoli did not have a protective fungicide during the rainy and warm conditions we know to be ruinous to broccoli crowns because effective organic materials don’t exist. Sometimes all that we can do is cross our fingers. So, it was not a complete surprise to us to find our first batch of broccoli to have been ruined by Alternaria, a species of fungus that took off during this week’s rain. This pathogen also spoiled our red cabbage. We now place our hopes on our second planting of broccoli, and we’ll send our Caraflex cabbage (the pointy one), which we’ll harvest next week, instead of the red one.

We typically buy carrots from Denison Farm to send to you in the fall and winter (which we trade for our onions), and we’ll do it again this year, but you’ll also get some carrots of ours from an experiment Nate undertook. We farm on excellent soil, but it’s rocky and rolling, which makes it difficult to grow attractive carrots. Recently, we’ve learned that carrot growers, even those who have premium carrot soils, are increasingly producing their crops on ridges. Two ridges per bed and two rows of carrots per ridge. So, as a trial, we made ridges on a few short beds using our Checchi Magli potato hiller and planted them to carrots in August (which was a little late, but this was research). Nate pulled a few this week to check on their progress and was pleased to find that they are much straighter and much longer than the carrots he pulled from his control beds. We’ll bunch some up in a couple of weeks and send them to you. Next year’s carrots may all come from our own farm.  

Have a great week, Ted

Recipes

Too many peppers? Make a big batch of romesco - in red and green (yellow peppers would work) varieties. Making romesco? Commit to the Iberian menu and make a Spanish tortilla too. Still have last week’s rosemary? Make cookies!

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

 
Veronica