THE BEET : VOLUME 12, ISSUE 10
In this week’s BEET:
- Windflower Farm Open House
- Windflower Farm News
Windflower Farm Open House
Saturday August 24-Sunday August 25
LOCATION: Windflower Farm: 585 Meeting House Road, Valley Falls, NY 12185
Please sign-up here ASAP if you plan to attend the open house
Saturday: Arrive after lunch to tour the farm, meet the farm team, go to the county fair, swim in the Batten kill and enjoy music around the campfire. Please bring a dish for the Saturday evening potluck dinner with CSA members from all of Windflower Farm's CSAs in New York City.
Sunday: The farm staff will provide breakfast Sunday.
Nearby:
Washington County Fair
The fair brings together the best of everything, entertainment, 4-H Displays, Food, Music, Great Rides and more animals than anywhere else;
We truly have something for everyone.
The Hyde Collection's Georgia O'Keefe Lake George Exhibition
The Hyde Collection, in association with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, is organizing a first-of-its-kind exhibition that will closely examine the extraordinary body of work created by O’Keeffe of and at Lake George. From 1918 until the mid 1930s, O’Keeffe (1887-1986) spent part of the year at Alfred Stieglitz’s family estate, a thirty-six acre property situated just north of Lake George village in the southern basin of the lake. The exhibition will present a selection of fifty-eight paintings from both public and private collections.
The exhibition was recently cover story in the New York Times' Art & Design section.
Accommodations:
Camping at the farm is encouraged, but motels and B&Bs can be found in nearby Saratoga Springs (18 miles), Cambridge (7 miles) and Arlington, Vermont (15 miles)
WINDFLOWER FARM NEWS
Delivery #11, Week of August 19, 2013
It looks like a good tomato week. Expect to get a variety of beefsteak and small tomatoes. This week’s shares will also include peppers or eggplants, chiles, cucumbers or zucchinis, your choice of dill or cilantro, potatoes (we got the potato digger running again this weekend!), green snap beans, yellow onions, lettuces and arugula. Your fruit will be peaches. Our corn grower, Rich Moses, has struggled this year. The rainy start and deer pressure are largely to blame. I am told that they will have corn soon. In the meanwhile, I am looking for an alternative local sweet corn source.
It appears to me that the local tractor salesman knows what he’s doing. When I got home from delivering shares on Thursday, a new John Deere 5101E was in my yard. It’s outfitted with an air conditioned cab, four wheel drive, and 101 horse power. It’s an impressive machine. You might Google it. I had complained about the unreliability of my old John Deere down at the dealership when I was buying some parts and may have said something about trading it in. That’s all Jason, the salesman, needed to know. Hudson River Tractor Company trains its salesmen well, sending them on regular training trips to their manufacturing facilities in Illinois, Georgia and Germany. Jason can tell you about every John Deere ever made. He also knows, it seems, nearly everything about our little farm business. He knows the names and ages of my kids. He does his homework. Use it around the farm for a week or so, he told my wife, and let me know what you think. No strings attached, if you don’t like it, no big deal, I’ll have one of the guys bring it back to the dealership. He knows that Jan does most of the snow plowing here, and he told her he could picture her plowing comfortably, heat blasting warm air, and Burl Ives singing Jack Frost on the CD player. Nathaniel was the first to use it. He mowed an old field and reported that it was pretty terrific. I finally climbed aboard late on Friday afternoon. I mowed, chisel plowed, tilled and ran my deep rippers, and none of the tasks seemed to tax the tractors capabilities. Most exciting for me, it can pull my 400-bushel compost spreader. I can imagine all the remote fields getting the attention they deserve. The tractor was quiet, the air seat gave a more comfortable ride than I experience in my box truck travelling across 14th Street in Manhattan, and the air conditioning felt good. Jason told me that I could get twice as much work done in a cab tractor, isolated from the ill effects of the sun and the wind. And he said they’d not only give me $11,000 for my old John Deere 6400, but 0% for 60 months on the balance. Nothing could be easier.
I hope to see you here for this weekend’s farm open house (if you are coming, please RSVP with an email to
tedblomgren@gmail.com).
Until then, have a great week,
Ted
