Week 5 Update

Happy 4th of July! I hope you all have an enjoyable weekend. We will be attending a picnic. Yay! We love picnics. We are taking cucumbers and onions as our contribution. What a refreshing side dish. How else can we use up all of these cukes? If you have ideas, please post them as a comment under the cucumber entry of our Eats blog.

On to the brief farm report. We need rain. We haven't had rain in three weeks, and things are beginning to suffer. We are watering most crops with the drip irrigation, and it is keeping them going pretty well. Irrigation is not nearly as good as rain. We don't use drip irrigation on things like potatoes, onions, or corn. We plant far too many rows of these to affort the time to put the tapes down and ensure that they are close enough to the plant to be functional. We are using sprinklers for these three crops this year. It is keeping them alive for now. The onions are soon ready to harvest, so any last bits of moisture we can get into them will make larger bulbs. We are spending a good deal of time fiddling with moving the sprinkler head and turning the irrigation valves on and off. It is taking time away from our fall planting and seeding schedule. Our schedule is always so full that if one thing runs late, it pushes so many other tasks back. Hopefully we will get caught up over the long weekend.

Bugs? Oh yes, we have them. The squash bugs are laying many, many eggs on the spaghetti squash,. They are the most tenacious bug for organic farm to cope with. There is no pesticide approved for organic production that controls them. We do our best and expect to lose a percentage of our crop each year. It seems that they get worse every year. The cucumber beetles are still here, and we are still spraying Pyganic to conrol them. It works for the most part, but needs to be applied about once a week. We still have the other usual critters, and are working on getting their population lowered.

Diseases? We are still looking pretty good on this front. Some of the Chard has shown signs of a leaf spot, but it seems to be rather limited.

Wildlife? It is like a baby animal zoo here. We discovered those four baby raccoons last week. This week Andy has begun the official War on Groundhogs. We have at least 30 on our property and many of them are babies. So far this weekend the score is Andy 3, Groundhogs 0. Yay Andy! Someday we will be able to grow fennel and lettuce that is beautiful again.

I think next week we will begin to pick green beans. We will also try to get the rest of the fall cabbages planted, and maybe some of the annual herbs that I want to give out like dill and caraway. remember if you would like to help out, please let us know. We are able to accept help every day from about 9 to about 5. Have a great week!