Pick-ups start the week of June 23rd. Please plan accordingly.
I sent everyone pick-up instructions for their particular pick-up location on Friday. If you did not receive them please let me know and I will resend them. Let me know if you have any questions.
We still have veggies shares available. So if you were hoping that your excuse for not rejoining is that we are out of shares you’ll either have to come up with another excuse or buy a share. Tell all your friends, neighbors and family members to join!
If you want to order any of our other shares please do so ASAP. Our other shares include but are not limited to (well, maybe they are limited to these) Fruit, Cheese, Flowers, ‘Shrooms, Coffee, and Winter. All these items can be delivered to drop sites as well!
July 4th is a Friday this year. We plan to be open the usual time that day. If you usually pick-up that day and you’d like to switch to a different day please let me know soon. If you will not be picking up your share that week or the following week — or frankly any week — please let me know at your earliest convenience.
Farm News
Occasionally I feel the need to educate the members of the farm on some of the interesting things we find in nature here. Kind of a feed the body, feed the mind philosophy. This is one of those feed the mind occasions.
An issue we had this spring that I don’t recall seeing in the past (and I did a search on my newsletters to confirm I haven’t written about it before) is aphids in the greenhouse. I guess in some ways I’m surprised we haven’t had this problem before. Seems like a greenhouse is a great home for aphids. Its warm. The plants are young. Not many predators. Seems like an ideal habitat. But until this season they hadn’t been a problem.
Early on this season we found aphids on a lot of our young broccoli plants and our larger pepper plants we plant in pots to grow the hottest of our hot peppers. When I first noticed the broccoli plants were a bit stunted I thought maybe whoever planted the seeds didn’t put any fertilizer in the planting mix. But as I inspected closer I noticed the telltale signs of aphids, which would be the presence of aphids.
Aphids are soft-bodied — aren’t we all frankly — insects that are pretty remarkable. From this wikipedia article: “A typical life cycle involves flightless females giving live birth to female nymphs—who may also be already pregnant, an adaptation scientists call telescoping generations—without the involvement of males”. Seems like an interesting life, except for the born pregnant part. What purpose do the male aphids fill? Maybe they are in charge of the TV remote. Anyway, aphids typically hide on the underside of the leaves so unless you look there you may not find them.
In the field we don’t normally see aphid problems since we don’t like crawling around on the ground, lifting up leaves looking for them. Oh, that and there are a lot of ladybugs hanging out here — both the native ladybugs and the Asian variety. I mentioned this in a past newsletter. The ladybugs and more importantly their larva love to eat aphids. As long as the plants are available to ladybugs and their offspring the aphids are kept under control.
The greenhouse acts as somewhat of a barrier to these aphid devouring ladybugs, but like most of us have seen in our own homes, there is no way to keep out all the ladybugs. They seem to find every crack and crevice to get into the structure. And the greenhouse has a lot of cracks and crevices — especially when the louvers or doors are open. So I’d expect the ladybugs would keep the aphids under control in the greenhouse much like they do inside our own other-color houses.
But — and there has to be a but otherwise this discussion would be over — there is one thing in the greenhouse that helps aphids thrive that hopefully you don’t have in your own house — ants! What? Why would the presence of ants have any affect on the presence of aphids? Farmer Chris have you lost your mind? Probably, but this discussion doesn’t prove that. You see ants “farm” aphids. They protect aphids from predators. Ants love the honeydew the aphids excrete as they feast on my plants. So by protecting the aphids from their predators they are getting that sweet, sweet food substance in return.
So how do you get rid of aphids? Well, you can try pesticides but I’ve found that unless you can exclude the ants, there will always remain aphids who survive the pesticide and the ants relocate them and build the aphid colony anew. The best way to get rid of aphids is to get rid of the ants. And ants are difficult to completely eradicate. A second alternative is to try to exclude the ants from the plants. This is tough to do for plants planted in the ground. However, if you have a plant in a pot you can coat a sticky substance around the pot so the ants can’t get to the plant. They try to cross the sticky stuff but get stuck and eventually perish. This typically works for awhile but eventually enough ants get stuck in the goop to provide a dead ant bridge for the other ants to cross the goop where they then start farming the aphids again.
What worked for us this season is we transplanted all the broccoli into the field away from the ants and accessible to the ladybugs. Once they were out in the field the ladybugs and the wee little ladybug children ate the aphids. The hot pepper plants we grow in pots have been more problematic. We first moved the plants out of the greenhouse and into the cold frame where the ladybugs have more access to the aphids. We have also been hitting the plants with a good, hard spray of water to try to dislodge the aphids. It worked somewhat but not completely. However once we moved the pots outside where the ladybugs were even more abundant the problem disappeared. Also perhaps the ants were unable to find the plants in their new location. I am hopeful the ladybugs and their children will feast on any of the future aphids and allow our pepper plants to reach their full potential.
I don’t know where the aphids came from or why we had such a problem this year but at least if we see this again in the future I will hopefully discover it before it gets so out of control.
As always, send in your questions, comments, suggestions, share orders, etc.
Joke of the Week
You can tell the gender of an ant by putting it in water. If it sinks it is a girl ant. Floats? Buoyant.