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Here Comes the Sun!

I was so happy last night when I checked the forecast for the rest of the week and saw lots of yellow suns on the chart! Wow have we had some long stretches of cloudy and wet weather this spring. The potato field where the clover had grown over the winter barely got mowed before all of the rains started. Needless to say, perhaps, we will not have many potatoes this year from our gardens. The field is still too wet to do anything in with the tractor and it needs to be mowed again after all of this rain. The clover is trying to rebound!

But that is part of farming. It’s a bit of a gamble sometimes. I’m kind of bummed because I love spring potatoes, but , instead of planting potatoes, I’ll put in more melon varieties, try a few new ones, and more of the ones I know grow well here. We’ll add another row of cucumbers and try our hand at some soybeans, organic ones of course. They not only add nitrogen to the soil, they make good snacks as edamame.

The other thing to look out for now that the soil is saturated, the sun has been hiding for weeks, and the plants are stressed out, is pests. Spring is already prime time for reproduction. But they’re on the lookout for plants that are not doing very well to take out, so they do not reproduce. So in your gardens, be watchful for the small moths, that lay eggs on your brassica; the reddish wasp-like female squash vine borer who will be spying your zucchini and other squash plants about now; and of course at night, you’ll see the beautiful, but egg laying, tobacco horn worm moth – looking lovingly at your growing tomato plants for a place to lay her eggs. There’s a product we can use as organic growers to control all of these pests very effectively. It’s called BT for short. Bacillus thuringiensis is it’s long name. It controls insects of the Lepidoptera type. Those would be caterpillars. Now this is not going to spare those of the butterfly type, so take care where you use it. Dill, fennel and parsely are all among favorites of some of

the beautiful Swallowtails that come through. So be sure to keep your BT away from those plants and just put in some extra ones to share. I generally pick off a few of the larvae and condense them to one or two areas, to leave the rest of the plants for harvest.

Well, it’s catch up time now that the sun is back out and there’s a market this weekend. I hope you all have a chance to get your hands in the dirt, too. As they say, it’s cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes! Speaking of tomatoes, there are going to be some extra plants available at market this weekend – come get a few!

Eat Your Food - Naturally!

 Marie