Boy, oh boy. This week sure took us on a trip. And just like a good trip there were ups and downs, lefts and rights, some turning around, rerouting, feeling nervous about the signs on the side of the road, and finally, eventually, arriving in the right place at long last. Woohoo!
Monday gave us some facetime with the rain. While Michael held down the washroom again this week, Erin and I put on ponchos and made for the gardens. We secured some good coverage from the rain in Hoop Two while gathering another round of cabbage, but before long we made our way out to the fields to get drizzled on in the garlic patch.
Aside from pulling garlic stalks from the ground, the rest of the process can be done either in or outside, so we were able to set our haul of garlic aside, saving the next step for the rainiest portion of the day while we left to collect kohlrabi and turnips, but before we made it we were sidetracked by one of nature's most prolific pests…. The Colorado Potato Beetle.
More commonly referred to as “potato bugs” on the farm, The Colorado Potato Beetle lives to squander all of our potato efforts as it attempts to maintain its fast paced life cycle. These notorious little critters have red heads with black spots, as well as white wings with black stripes, and love to live out their lavished little lifestyles on the leaves of living potato plants. They lay their tiny orange eggs in little clusters underneath potato leaves, making it difficult to locate and, well… squash. Once they hatch, they are able to get right to chewing on potato plant leaves, day in and day out, growing bigger and bigger until they are able to contribute their own cluster of eggs to the life cycle. Before long, an entire extended family of potato pests might wipe out your potato patch, so be on the lookout!
They started popping up a few weeks ago, which led to many thorough passes through our many beds of potatoes. Unfortunately, try as we did, there was only so much time we could dedicate on the farm to this particular task, and the potato bugs don’t just stop when we are resting on our weekends. It ends up becoming a real “drop everything and start squishing” kind of task, even when there is already much harvesting to be done. So on our way to turnips and kohlrabi, we put a pause to harvesting and took an hour-long detour through the potato patch, encountering hundreds of little potato bugs grazing away without a care in the world. Folks, it’s a lot of squishing.
And by the time we finished, we weren’t exactly prepared to put our hands on your precious veggies. So we turned back to clean up and lunch before heading back out to harvest. Talk about turning around and rerouting!
Eventually the rain did pick up, so we wheeled our veggie-filled carts back to the pack shed to wash veggies and clean up garlic. If you aren’t familiar, garlic is a fun, repetitive task that takes a while to get through. Each bulb of garlic is clipped off of its green stalk, snipped free of its dangly roots, and peeled down to a clean layer of white skin so that it can look nice and fresh while curing for a couple of weeks in a dry storage space. On Thursday, Erin and I harvested the first bed of Inchelium Red garlic, after spending the last couple weeks harvesting Lorz Italian garlic. I hope you’re ready to get your garlic bulb on!
On Tuesday, despite the wild fire smoke wafting down from Canada, we had much to do outside. We took gem, summer crisp, and romaine lettuce from the ground, put two more beds of lettuce mix, gem, and summer crisp lettuce into the ground, dug up carrots, pulled up beets and weeds, and grabbed more garlic from the garlic patch. By the end of the day, we were grateful that most of Wednesdays and Thursdays are spent in doors preparing and packing veggies for the CSAs.
Speaking of prepping veggies, we have been prepping four-ounce bags of a baby asian green mixture that I would like to highlight this week. Farmer Zach has carefully selected a combination of red and green tatsoi, red mizuna, and wasabina leaves to create an asian green blend that is as beautiful growing out on the farm as it is packed into little baggies. The wasabina has a little kick that resembles wasabi, and the leaves are pretty! When I’m not eating them straight from the bag, I’m using them to decorate sandwiches and any spare room I have on a plate of food.
After a week of navigating smoke, rain, bugs, and all of the already taxing work that farmwork entails, we were grateful to receive a very smooth pack parade on Thursday. Despite having some substitutes fill in for our regular crew, and having more veggies present than any pack yet this year, everyone worked together well, and we rocked it! Thanks to Aiden, Aleah, Reagan, Rodney, and Paige for making it happen!
And a special thanks to Rodney and Reagan, who insisted that their mother make us a treat for our snack break. I got to try my first scotcharoo, which is apparently a real staple out here. It’s a peanut butter, butterscotch, and chocolate treat that will spread delight throughout your homes, so give it a google!
See you scotcharound,
-Alex
