Chaotic Buggy Day! We started the day by trying to harvest the strawberries in pasture field, but they were almost all too ripe, bug bites, etc. so we moved on to harvest arugula, sugar snap peas, English peas, turnips, and sunflowers :). The strawberries in the hoop house are still not up to par; the plan is to harvest all the edible ones and tomorrow we'll gut the rest, meaning take off all the bug/disease damaged one and see if that'll help the plants. Strawberry experiment 2012 will commence tomorrow!
After lunch we were bunching and cleaning and a CSA member came early, which is a problem when we continually run late and are low on produce again so not sure what's even going in the box, and did I mention it makes me uncomfortable when someone is there watching me put together a mystery box? Deep breath, where were we...so onward to harvesting squash in lower field 3. Squash or S-Squash as Daniel pronounces it, has been quite the looker so far! Squash has historically been pollinated by the native North American squash bee, and related species, but this bee and its relatives have declined, probably due to pesticide sensitivity, and most commercial plantings are pollinated by European honey bees today. Our bees looked American to me, they were overweight and fighting over pollen.
Another bug that we encountered in droves today is the squash bug. In Jeff Cook field they planted pumpkins last year, and squash this year...same family, big organic no no! On this one row of summer squash Erica and I killed about forty bugs and took out at least 100 leaves with their eggs attached. We collected the leaves in a bag which we'll burn tomorrow. I feel like I went on a bug killing rampage because after Daniel and I finished washing the pac choi, us interns washed the broccolini and killed the imported cabbageworms still attached.
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| Squash me |
PS: Today I am featured in The Kind Life!
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