Our basil and parsley plants are ready early this year, so we're offering them for sale in the dairy store before the CSA opens. The basil is a variety called Genovese Compact, and the parsley is a flat-leaf variety called Giant of Italy. These plants are ready to go in the ground now! Our tomato seedlings are not quite ready yet, but those will be for sale once the CSA opens. It looks like we will have some lettuce ready before the CSA opens as well, so we are planning to make that available sometime next week in the Dairy Store.
This week has brought some welcome rain at the farm. The wet weather has limited our ability to carry out tractor cultivation, but we have been plenty busy transplanting our first tomatoes and summer sqaush, putting the finishing touches on the hoophouse, catching up on seeding in the greenhouse, setting up drip irrigation lines, and of course plenty of handweeding in carrots, beets, fennel, scallions, lettuce and cabbage! Big thanks to volunteers from New England Biolabs who did a stellar job Wednesday afternoon helping us tack down landscape fabric and thinning and weeding a whole bed of beets!
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| Colorado potato beetle |
One new task we worked on this week had to do with pest control. This morning the crew spent several hours picking Colorado potato beetles off of our red potato plants and squashing the eggs that have been laid on their leaves. These nasty bugs love to feast on potato and eggplant. We expect them to hit hard every year in mid-June, but this year we've been suprised by an early onslaught of adult beetles. In the past, we have used an organically-approved spray called Entrust to control the beetles. (The active ingredient in Entrust is spinosad, which is a bacterial by-product discovered in a Caribbean rum distillery in the 1970s!) It has been very effective in ensuring healthy potato and eggplant crops in the past several years, but in order to remain effective, it's really important not to overuse it, as potato beetles can eventually build up resistance. We know we'll probably have to spray later in the season for the next generation of potato beetles, so for this reason we're trying to knock back this first flush of beetles the old-fashioned way- dropping them into some soapy water!
