Two Feet in the Dirt

This week definitely entails a lot of re-grouping for us. We had beds to rebuild and tons of peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes to finally get in the ground. Mike spent hours on Monday reburying all of the plastic mulch on the tomato beds. The dirt that was holding it down had been washed away in last week’s torrential rain and it was no fun at all to have to re-do an already challenging task that we thought we had completed for the year.

Even as we feel like we’re still playing catch-up, the natural world continues to roll along and pest season on the farm has officially begun. Flea beetles are little black bugs that plague crops like arugula by eating tiny, pin-prick holes in the leaves, thereby reducing the crop’s marketability and ability to photosynthesize. Already, the flea beetles have found their way to both the eggplant seedlings and the eggplant currently in the ground in the hoop house. Out in the field, we’re dealing with a pest that I haven’t experienced before. Wireworms are the larval form of click beetles and are most common in ground that has been in undisturbed grass for many years. Unfortunately for us, this is exactly what our farm was until last fall- a huge field of grass for as long as any of our neighbors remember. The little orange-ish brown wireworms have been boring their way into the stems of the lettuce heads, killing the plants at a rate of at least one per day. Fortunately, while they like to hang out in the top few inches of the soil during the cooler spring weather, they burrow deeper down as the soil heats up through the summer, so fingers crossed they will be out of our hair sooner rather than later. It’s definitely nerve-wracking planting seedlings out in the field knowing that the wireworms are out there waiting to eat them.

It looks like we’ll be in for some nice weather at the market this weekend, so stop by for a big supply of baby greens, large leaf kale, and a continued bounty of radishes and turnips as well as the first spring onions. Check out our full harvest list below and we’ll see you on Saturday!

Farmers Katie & Mike

This week at the market

• Head Lettuce
• Baby Kale
• Full leaf kale (Curly Green and Dinosaur)
• Lettuce salad mix
• “The Works” salad mix
• Radishes
• Salad turnips
• Mustard Greens
• Arugula
• Spring onions