This Sunday, October 8th from 5pm-Midnight, you’ll find us at the Brooklyn Night Bazaar!Located at the new DeKalb Market in downtown Brooklyn, we’re bringing our Sunday best in produce and treats. Look for chickens–they’re joining us too!
This week we had the pleasure of two sweet things: in the early hours of Sunday, Meg Paska harvested our first fall frames from her top bar hive at Eagle Street Rooftop Farm–and later in the day, Michael Leung of Hong Kong Honey came by for a visit. We’re excited to meet these “newbees”–intelligent, interesting, passionate beekeepers recent to the trade–and pick their brains about the lovely balance of self-education in ecology and entomology necessary to keep 30,000 ladies happy in a hive.
This week at the Farm, we’ve got the hots for you! Our Andy, Ladybug, Hungarian Hot Wax, Jalapeno and Ancho Poblano peppers are in full swing, with more rare varieties in smaller amounts–you’ve got to try them to believe us, but we’ll swear up and down we’ve got the hottest fruits in town. We’ve been making our beloved “CONCENTRATE!!” a mix of vinegar, salt and hot peppers that lets the peppers shine. Your job is to add the mango juice, tomato puree, chocolate powder and roasted peanuts–whatever it is that allows you to enjoy best the spiciest crop on the farm.
This Sunday at 2pm we’re joined by author, professor and historian Annie Hauck-Lawson, who’ll school us on making a treat that sounds tasty but is best left for the garden: worm compost cookies. Yum! More on Annie can be found here.
This Saturday and Sunday are full of places to go and food to taste! Your farmers will be serving up tasty treats with the first annual New York Honey Festival in the Rockaways on Saturday, and then Saturday night we’re boogey-ing back to Brooklyn to The Good Festival for a 9pm cooking demo between live music sets. On Sunday, we’ll be on deck to serve up more treats (and teach you how to pot up the plants to grow them!) at Taste Williamsburg-Greenpoint. Don’t worry: our Sunday market will be open from 10-4 as usual this Sunday, as well, so you can still get your favorite ingredients for your own cooking, as well as pitch in as we sow our fall crops.
Oh basil! The season of its sweet green leaves is quickly closing–when frost comes in a month, we’ll bid our best pesto ingredient adieu. Come join us at our Sunday market, 10am-4pm.
Labor Day became an official national holiday in 1894. It’s a favorite holiday of ours at Rooftop Farm, as it marks the gentle bridge between seasons when our fruiting plants (tomatoes, cucumbers) begin to fade. We farmers feel the same, making that last rewarding sprint-push towards the Fall. What’s not to love about early September? The nights drop to 60*F, we can again plant radishes, and the monarchs float across the farm on their journey down the Northeast Atlantic flyway zone towards sunny Mexico.
The Rooftop Farm is closed today for the Labor Day holiday. See you on Sunday, September 11th from 9am-4pm.
We urban farmers escaped the storm’s worst after-affects, but we’re deeply saddened by news of the ongoing problems caused by Hurricane Irene for our farmer friends and mentors upstate. The timing of this bad weather will affect farmers now and during the winter months, as many of the end of summer crops they’d planned to store and sell throughout the off season (potatoes, onions) were lost last week under the waters of heavy rains. Worse yet, we’re expecting seed prices to rise dramatically next year, as the farms that grow the seed (Johnnys and High Mowing Seeds, for example) were also under flood waters during the tropical storm.
What can you do? Buy locally and buy it now; buy more than you need and can it and put it up. If you’ve never made tomato sauce, get out to your Greenmarkets and make it today.
Specific farms are rallying together benefits and buyer options for future crops–we’ll keep you posted as we hear about them. On October 16th, 2011 the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm is holding an all-day snack attack with Rockaway Taco to benefit Evolutionary Organics, our mentors in New Paltz, New York. Join us then and in the weeks before, shop locally.
Every now and again we get kudos from international friends. It warms the heart and loosens the muscles in our achey backs to see that the world all over is excited about good food and farming. This news blast came our way from Finland via friends at the Brooklyn Brewery who (along with the deserving Mast Brothers and other Brooklyn food makers) got a nod as well. How do you say “Thanks for the props!” in Finnish? We don’t know, but we did learn a new word: “maanviljelijä” is Finnish for “farmer”!
Late on Friday night and early again on Saturday morning, the Eagle Street Rooftop Farmers prepared for the oncoming rain and stormy weather. The ripen and close-to-ripe tomatoes and peppers were harvested, any loose buckets, boards and posts were brought downstairs, and the apiaries were weighted down with multiple cinder blocks. In case of flooding, the nursery flats were carried up to the farm and weighted down between the rows of taller pepper and tomato plants. The chickens were brought from their upstairs coop to the farm market room. The coop is too solid to move (and weighted down, as well), but for the chicken’s well-ventilated coop, there’s always the threat of sustained sideways-blown rain.
Dozens of tweets and phone calls came through all morning offering help. The final step, after the drains were cleared and everything was sealed off? Saying goodbye to this season’s sunflowers and cosmos, whose tender blooms may not make it through the wind.
This Sunday due to predicted weather and transit closure, we are not open. We’ll be there–rescuing as many tomato plants and keeping an eye on our chicken coop–but you should stay home with a good book.