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Farming without chemicals means farming with a vigilance toward bugs, a fixation on seeking them out and squishing them yourself in an attempt to gain the upper hand in what can often seem like a losing battle. I’ve accepted this fact (and have spent a ton of time killing stink bugs and hornworms) but have [...]
The contents of this week’s box: zucchini, summer squash, eggplant, three pints cherry tomatoes, one pint heirloom tomatoes, one pint tomatillos (the first of the season), two onions, one bunch garlic, mint and okra.
Declining squash harvests are still a disappointment, but I noticed new growth all week, including the ripening of a couple of cucumbers [...]
Eight weeks down, nine left to go. It’s hard to believe that the farm has come this far! The tomato plants are still reeling from this month’s rain damage (some of them have just this week developed brown and withered leaves, which I’m hoping is a simple-to-solve case of not having enough nutrients), the squash [...]
I’ve skipped out on updating this site these past couple of weeks, but not because things at the farm have been slow. Instead, the subscriber boxes have been getting heavier and heavier, and produce has started to fill up our fridge and pile over the dining room table.
The contents of last week’s box: zucchini, summer [...]
This week was a hot one. I arrived at the farm earlier than usual on Wednesday to finish the morning’s harvest fast, but was forced to stay later than expected when I realized that a horde of harlequin bugs had started chomping up my tomatillos. I spotted the stinkbug relative and ladybug look-a-like earlier in [...]
I was fortunate enough to have a bunch of help with this week’s harvest, so filling the boxes was a breeze. The contents: lettuce heads, zucchini, summer squash, one bunch Sierra Blanca onions, one bunch rainbow chard, one bag basil and one bag herb blend, which included sage, oregano and thyme.
I still don’t have enough [...]
I found a tobacco hornworm earlier this week, hidden in the foliage of a tomato plant.
I’m used to seeing these caterpillars with small white eggs emerging from their backs (the eggs of the braconid wasp), but this dude was parasite-free and eager to eat. Hornworms, so named for the sharp spike on their backs, are [...]
I’ve been paranoid about pests (deer! Groundhogs! Potato beetles!) ever since I started this project. Last week, I encountered my first one: the flea beetle, which has been RAVAGING the winter greens. A friend suggested I spray with a botanical insecticide. I picked up a bottle of pyrethrin last week and tested it out on [...]