First I want to thank the one person who contacted our complaint line. The complaint department has been working overtime sitting by the phones, facebook page and email system waiting for someone to ring in. It is a thankless job requiring a tremendous amount of fortitude and patience. But this hard work paid off when we heard that some of the corn had earworms. This both surprises us and doesn’t surprise us all at the same time. Growing corn organically is tricky.
Corn earworms are the caterpillar of a moth that does not over winter here in the great white north. The moth migrates here from the south in typically two flights per season. The first flight arrives in mid-June and is usually small. That is why we are both surprised (due to the usual small population) and not surprised (because they arrive in mid-June) that some people found some earworms. Hopefully it was limited to just a few of you, and hopefully those who received them are not squeamish.
For those who have not experienced the corn earworm they are the type of caterpillar only a mother could love — quite ugly. Typically they range in size from a half inch to two inches long. You will usually find them at the tip of the ear below the husk but they can also be found less frequently along the ear. They will eat the kernels of the corn and excrete their mushy frass, which is a telltale sign of an earworm issue. If you come across one simply take it off (or rinse it off if you don’t want to touch it) and enjoy the corn. If it has feasted upon your corn for a while you may want to cut off the part where it ate to make the corn more visually appealing. The rest of the ear will still be great. One service we provide for on-farm pick-up is corn earworm location and removal for the more squeamish among us. Simply ask me when you are picking up in the tent and I will find some corn without earworms. We try to do the same for delivery boxes but don’t always succeed since we don’t want to dig too deeply into the husk.
So this begs the question: why not just do something to prevent them? That is a great question. What a lot of farmers do to prevent corn earworms is grow GMO corn that has a part of the protein of a type of bacteria inserted into its genome. The bacteria, Bacillus thuringiensis, creates a toxin that kills caterpillars. By inserting it into the corn plant the idea is that any caterpillar that eats part of the corn plant will die from consuming the toxin generated by the plant itself. Great idea huh? Well, no. What seems to be happening is corn earworms are becoming resistant to at least one of the toxins created from the bt protein, something that was predicted when bt corn was created. Not good for the GMO crowd but also not good for the organic farmers either. Bt is an approved organic pesticide that is used for many caterpillar pests. With some pests becoming resistant to the toxin we are losing one of the most effective organic tools for managing these pests. And since we organic farmers cannot resort to more toxic pesticides our jobs are becoming ever more difficult.
Is there another solution? Sure. One approach is to put a couple drops of an organic oil in each ear of corn at the time the corn is silking. This oil will smother or prevent the earworm from getting into the ear. Sounds good, until you take an eye dropper and a bucket of oil into a corn field and try to put a few drops of oil on 3000 ears of corn. Who’s got that kind of time? So we resort to another tried and true approach to corn earworm management — alerting our customers to be on the look out for them. Plus we try to get all our corn harvested before the second flight of moths that typically arrives in mid-August. Not sure if we are going to beat them this year…
What will we have this week? This week we will have carrots! We are digging the first of the carrots Wednesday morning. We have no idea what we will find but hopefully it will be a lot of carrots. We’ll also have some tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and tomatillos this week. I’m not sure if there will be enough for everyone to have some yet though. We will also have more cucumbers, squash, beets, onions, kale, chard, cabbage, potatoes, broccoli, green beans, yellow beans, a few eggplants, and maybe some more basil, oh and the last of the remaining fennel. If we have time we’ll grab some of the herbs like oregano, thyme, lemon thyme and parsley. The cilantro isn’t big enough yet but hopefully soon. And I think we will give out some of the garlic we dug the past few days, however it has not been fully cured. What is the impact? Well, it will be harder to peel, it will be more oily, your fingers will smell like garlic for a few days and it will be incredibly delicious. But unless you cure it yourself it may not keep long. But why would you try to keep it when there is plenty more coming later this season? So use it soon and enjoy the taste of fresh garlic!
We have FruitShare this week. It is a mixed box of grapes, blueberries, nectarines, peaches and pluots. There might be some plums as well.
CheeseShare and EggShare are this week as well.
MeatShare comes on Friday.
SeafoodShare and SalmonShare are here for those who have not yet picked them up.
I think that is all. If you have any questions please send them in. I’m running out of things to say.
Now if I can only get that song out of my head…