Two Feet in the Dirt

It’s been a pretty devastating week on the farm with the discovery that our entire onion crop is infested with root maggots. Once these pests are present, there’s nothing you can do about them, so instead of getting our first harvest of spring onions, we’ve spent the week ripping out all of our onions. There is also a big chance that this will affect our garlic and we’re just praying that at the very least we are able to save enough to have seed for next year’s crop, especially as one of our garlic varieties is one that I’ve brought with me from farm to farm for years and is therefore pretty much irreplaceable.

We try to take things in stride, so as incredibly hard as it has been to see all of this hard work go to waste, there are two things I’m trying to keep in mind. First, these root maggots are fairly preventable if we take some preemptive measures in the future, so the hope is that we will be able to have a successful scallion crop for the fall and will be able to grow onions and garlic again next year. Second, because we are a diversified farm, our season does not hinge on this one crop. As soon as I had enough of the onions removed, I immediately replanted the bed with a different crop family and hopefully we will still be able to harvest close to an equivalent value in crops even without the onions.

All said and done, while it’s been a downer of a week, most of the farm is still happily growing away and we’ll have plenty at the market and even more in the coming weeks. Below is this week’s harvest list. We’ll see you at the markets!

Farmers Katie & Mike

Harvest List:

• Lettuce salad mix
• Arugula
• Hearty Winter Mix
• Lettuce heads
• Radishes
• Spinach
• Hakurei turnips
• Bok choi
• Red Russian kale
• Curly green kale
• Lacinato kale
• Collard greens
• Rainbow Chard
• Kohlrabi
• Maybe: Carrots