June is here, so soon. The rains of the past few days have been helpful and not so helpful. The crops responded by growing a visible amount over the past few days, so have the weeds. We were able to get quite a lot done on Monday despite the rains. All the winter squash was sown on Monday, the bean/cucumber bed was trellised, another field was bedded up, ready to be planted field corn, popcorn, sorghum, and sweet corn on Wednesday morning. As you will read below, the potatoes were cleaned of Colorado Potato Beetles. And the greenhouse tomatoes were suckered and trellised. All in all not bad for a mornings work. There is always a million things to do and only enough hands and time to do about 8 of them, but we keep at it and hope that we can check off the most important ones come the end of the day. Some things to look forward to…the sweet peas will be coming in next week (I think) and there’s a lot of them! I was mowing the blueberry patch over the weekend and there were some berries starting to turn blue. Looking back to past years, we were harvesting the first variety of blueberry in the middle of June, only a couple of weeks away.
Nick’s Intern Perspective…
As many of you know, farm tasks can be quiet work. However, this past week we have had several conversations in the field about insects. There is the harlequin beetle (a flat orange and black bug that fits the various definitions of Harlequin, for it is various in color but most of all it is quite mischievous), the mexican bean beetle (essentially a copper looking ladybug that destroys beans of any sort) and our most recent adversary, the colorado potato beetle. Our conversation started when we noticed that the ladybugs and the potato beetle each were mating and laying eggs on the potato leaves. Ladybugs are beneficial insects and we want more of them around the farm so we tried to distinguish between the ladybug eggs and the potato beetle eggs and to leave the ones we thought belonged to the ladybugs. To say the least, the eggs look almost identical. Despite our good intentions Monday morning rolled around and the larva of the potato beetles had been enjoying an all you can eat buffet all weekend and were well on their way to adulthood. So our Memorial Day crew of CSA workers braved the rain and the larva for the sake of all that is potato.
In other news, the intern house has taken on quite the transformation over the weekend. Not only have we mowed down the annoying Jerusalem Artichoke with the DR Trimmer (I happen to have a secret love affair with this piece of equipment), but we have replaced them with wonderful flowers like Snapdragons, Nasturtium, Hollyhocks, Sunflowers and a vining Black Eyed Susan. Oh and that is only the beginning. We also have been working on a little side project in front of our house growing some of our own veggies. Our front yard “garden” residents include: sweet potatoes, parsnips, cilantro, purple broccoli, veronica cauliflower, brussels sprouts, napa cabbage (we love our brassicas) and even some varieties of Peppers and Tomatoes we don’t grow on the farm. It is our little way of testing out our farming ability. So far so good.
Even “sweeter” news than our wonderful little side project are the farm’s honey bees. According to our honey bee expert, Dave the Honey Man, our hives are doing quite well and we could even get some honey out of them in the next two to three weeks. A sweet treat from some of the best pollinators around.