I’ve been reading a lot about this online word game called Wordle. Anyone else hear about it? Learn my game strategy and results from last season’s seed treatment experiment (totally unrelated) right after these brief messages.
Sign-ups for the 2022 season are progressing nicely but as always, until we are sold out, we will continue to push for more sales. If you plan to join do so sooner if you can. Tell your friend about us too! There is a $25 referral credit for anyone you send our way. Our online store is always open (except when the online service dies).
We have completed our seed order for 2022. (See picture above for some of the seeds we purchased). Since nobody asked for anything new I have to assume a box of kale is all everyone wants. Well that isn’t really true. I asked for some new things so since I eat the same veggies you do — and I am not interested in just eating kale — you all benefit from my diverse tastes. Most of the new items are just different varieties of what we already grow. You still can weigh in on quantities of things for this season. Let me know if you want more or less of anything. Those of you who reply will have an outsized influence on this year’s crop distribution!
We are still looking for a new host location somewhere near 3M. Let me know if you are interested in helping out. There isn’t much to it other than having a place for the boxes to sit while waiting for pick-up.
Wordle Strategy
Anyone else hear about this new rage Wordle? Apparently you try to guess a five letter word in at most six chances. After each guess you are informed which letters you got correct and which letters you got in the correct location. Google Wordle if you really want to learn more. For those who play often and want to learn my strategy feel free to read on.
The first word I always guess is CHARD. It’s delicious, nutritious and obscure enough that it just may be the right word and I’ll be the only one to win in one guess! Then I follow up with ONION. Who doesn’t like onions? Then BASIL. Just thinking of the smell makes we long for summer! Next I go with MELON. My hope is that we have more melons this coming season. My fifth guess is always BEANS. It doesn’t matter to me if they are green or yellow. And finally CHILI. Despite this delicious strategy I haven’t won yet. Hmm, I’m not sure I really understand the purpose of this game…
Farm News
On to more important stuff. We here at Fresh Earth are always looking for ways to improve our products and yields. If we can do more for less we can keep our prices down and our quality up. It isn’t always easy and doesn’t always work but it doesn’t keep us from trying. And doing it all organically makes it all the more challenging.
Last year we tried a number of ways to improve our productivity and yield. One of the first things we tried was heat treating our seeds. To paraphrase the information from the linked newsletter (feel free to read for further information) the goal of heat treating the seeds is to eliminate one of the vectors for pathogens to get to our plants. Recall that we identified four vectors for pathogen introduction: wind, soil, pest and seeds. The idea behind the heat treating of the seeds was to reduce or hopefully eliminate one of these vectors — seed borne diseases. The idea is the heat kills the pathogen without killing the seed. It requires precise water temps and bath durations — something I require as well.
What were the results? Hard to tell since we didn’t really conduct a well designed experiment. We had no control group so any success could be attributed to other factors. For example, one of the pathogens we were trying to reduce or eliminate was black rot (Xanthamonas campestris pv. campestris) in our brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc.) Unrelated, we were simultaneously working with the University of Minnesota on a project to identify black rot resistant broccoli cultivars. They, being a University with scientists and everything were more scientific in their experiments. Their scientific experiment helped us to understand our non-scientific experiment. In our experiment we saw a reduction in black rot — in fact we saw very little black rot. Yipee! Heat treating works! But wait, in the U’s scientific experiment they didn’t see black rot this summer either — and they were intentionally inoculating their broccoli with the pathogen! So though it would appear we were successful in reducing black rot by heat treating our brassica seeds we could more likely just have been blessed by a year where black rot had a hard time getting established. This is a great example of why a control group is necessary for good research.
So now you’re thinking, “Why don’t you use a control group farmer Chris? Seems like you’d get better and more valuable results. Just saying”. The primary reason is we aren’t really set up very well to be a research farm. We need to produce our produce for our customers. If we grow heat treated broccoli seeds next to non-heat treated broccoli seeds as we would for the purpose of growing your food we most likely would see either all the broccoli getting black rot or none of the broccoli getting black rot. Heat treatment might or might not have helped. The pathogen can move from plant to plant. So again we wouldn’t know for sure if it worked. If we really wanted to do the scientific experiment well we would need to isolate heat treated from the non-heat treated and we just aren’t able to do it. So we just wing it and see what happens. If we weren’t part of the UofM trial we would most likely attribute last season’s decrease in black rot to the heat treating but as we discovered it may be just coincidence. So even though heat treating takes extra time it is extra time during the time of year when time is more available. So we will keep heat treating seeds and take all the credit for the disease reduction success, whether warranted or not.
Next newsletter I’ll cover what we are introducing this year to try to reduce pressure from one of the other pathogen vectors. I bet you can hardly wait! In the mean time, feel free to send in questions, comments, suggestions, stock tips and anything else you feel I’d find valuable or entertaining.
Here’s this week’s joke!
What did the daddy tomato say to the baby tomato?
Ketchup!