As part of our ongoing project to broaden our appeal to a more diverse audience we hired an image consultant to review our corporate identity and suggest ways to increase our market penetration. After a thorough review of our existing marketing and sales collateral they issued a 47 page report summarizing their findings. What were they? Change the heading in our newsletters from “Farm News” to “This Week’s Challenges”. That’s pretty much it. So to ensure we get our money’s worth from this professional consultation we have taken their advice and made the change in this week’s newsletter. I expect our readership will increase tenfold from one person to ten!
This Week’s Challenges
So what are this week’s challenges? Where do I begin? Our biggest challenge was trying to figure out what was eating our cucumbers. Nothing is as frustrating as putting a whole lot of effort into growing the produce we sell only for something to eat it just prior to our harvesting it. This is what is happening with our cucumbers. Almost all the full size cukes have essentially been hollowed out. We’ve never seen this before. (How many times do I write this every year?) At first glance one would think it could be the cucumber beetles we see inside the hollowed out cucumbers. It would stand to reason that if the tasty cucumber insides are now replaced by bugs that the bugs are the ones eating the cukes. But they are a red herring. They just take advantage of the soft music and mood lighting found inside cucumbers to do what cucumber beetles do quite well — reproduce.
So if not beetles, what else could it be? Our next guess was some type of mammal, say of the rodent variety. Why rodents? Well, the “bites” out of the cuke are about the size a small mammal would make. A deer’s bite would be far bigger, as would a chimpanzee’s, a bonobo’s and an orangutan’s. So we ruled each of these out fairly quickly. But we couldn’t rule out rodents.
But why now all of a sudden? As I wrote earlier, we haven’t seen this level of damage before. That question was answered when we tilled an area for planting the fall broccoli. Huh? How does tilling explain the sudden demise of the cucumbers? Well when I tilled the area it was like breaking up concrete. It is bone dry out there in the fields! After the 8+ inches of pounding rain followed by another 1.5″ not so pounding rain the next night we’ve had pretty much no rain for two weeks. On top of that we’ve had quite hot temperatures and scorching sun (is there any other kind of sun?) The result is there isn’t a lot of moisture out there for the plants or the animals. So the animals start eating the plants and one of the best sources of water would be cucumbers since they are mostly water.
That was our working hypothesis as of the end of last week. The remaining questions were: what rodents and how do we eliminate them? The area we have the cukes this year is near a large uncultivated grassy area. We figured the rodent(s) could be living in the weeds. So this weekend I mowed the area hoping to expose the criminal to the hawks and predators that should resolve the problem.
Well it didn’t help. Today’s cucumber harvest was 85% eaten cucumbers, which would make it 15% good cucumbers. Not the yield we count on when we make our planting plans. Now one other problem we have this year is the lack of hawks that typically hang out on the farm. I don’t know where they’ve gone but we typically have at least one here 100% of the time and frequently two or three others. But this year I haven’t seen any. Most concerning. I’ve seen far more ground squirrels this year than in a typical year which I attribute to the dearth of hawks. So my hypothesis narrowed down to ground squirrels. The next problem was where to hire a few hawks.
I was contemplating this today as I driving up the driveway and looked longingly toward the cucumber patch letting out a sigh imagining what it all could have been — then I let out a “What?!” Followed by a word not allowed in PG-13 newsletters. Standing in our cucumber patch was a murder of crows — well maybe not a full murder but certainly a manslaughter — pecking at what appeared from a distance to be a green sausage. Knowing I did not plant any sausages and if I did they would not be the green variety I quickly determined the green item was a cucumber! Another telltale sign was the lack of cats in the area. Aha! It’s the crows! No wonder there were no tracks. The crows fly in, peck holes in our cucumbers then fly out leaving a scattering of hollowed out cucumber corpses. Talk about frustration!
Now that I’ve see with my own eyes what is going on I recall a past year where we had crows eating our watermelons. In fact we seem to lose a few melons each year to crows. But we’ve never lost cucumbers to crows! I guess their tastes are evolving. So this week we will cover the cukes with mesh netting and then have to reach under it to harvest the cukes. Not our preferred approach to farming cucumbers but sometimes you have to work with nature by putting up an artificial barrier.
There were many other challenges that will have to remain secret for now. Hopefully they will not still be challenges next week.
What will we have this week?
We are slowing things down this week. We seem to be in a valley between the early veggie peak and the summer veggie peak. Early veggies are winding down (or are already down) and summer veggies are just ramping up. Anyway, we have very few cucumbers and no corn (see previous newsletter talking about the first planting of corn being frozen this Spring). However we will continue to have an abundance of zucchini/summer squash! It seems the crows don’t like zucchinis, which are planted just few beds down from the cucumbers. We will also have some nice red onions called Cabernet. The rest of the items this week will be in various quantities none of which is enough for every share. These include fennel, kohlrabi, eggplants, kale (it’s a bit flea beetle bitten unfortunately), some tomatoes (why did I wait so long to mention the first week of tomatoes?), okra, beets, snap peas, snow peas, broccoli (this could be our worst broccoli year ever), and maybe a few odds and ends. We dug a potato plant this past weekend and determined we need to wait another week on potatoes. Carrots are the same but maybe two weeks. Hopefully beans next week! Of course this all depends on getting some much needed rain.
CoffeeShare and FlowerShare this week. No other shares.
Recipe of the Week
Usually around this time of the season we get fennel. Fennel is something most people don’t go out of their way to purchase and so they have no idea what to do with it. I happen to like the taste of fennel so I just saute it with other veggies like zucchini and eggplant and put it over pasta (or zucchini noodles). I like the fresh, anise taste it adds to the dish. I should probably mention the part of the plant I am talking about is the bulb part at the bottom, right above the tap root we cut off. Here is our friend Martha Stewart explaining how to cut up a fennel bulb.
If you are wondering what to do with the fronds I highly suggest pesto. Use your favorite pesto recipe (or go to this newsletter from last season) and substitute fennel fronds for the basil or use some of both! I think it is a sweeter, tastier pesto. I suggest you cut up the fronds into smaller pieces before processing them in a food processor. Sometimes the longer fronds shred more than grind.
As always, do not hesitate to contact me with questions, comments, suggestions, jokes and whatever else cats are afraid of.