There are some lovely Millsap Farm greens in this week's shares, plus some kale and salad mix from Box Turtle farms. We have been cleaning up and putting the garden to bed around the farm. This is a time of the year when we pull stakes, remove old plants, roll up row covers that are no longer in use, pull all the irrigation out of the fields, drain and freeze proof manholes, and a host of other tasks for the winter. One thing you will not see when you visit the farm in the winter is fields cleaned off of all summer growth. We leave a lot of standing dead plants to over winter in the fields; this is part of our effort to maintain a healthy ecosystem in the fields;
These dead sunflowers in the picture above are an example of the value of this approach. These sunflowers, and the dead sudan grass and Millet between them, provide food and shelter for birds, residences for overwintering lacewing and ladybug larvae, wind break, and a convenient spot for butterfly and moth eggs to hang out. We learned several years ago that if we looked closely, we could almost always find Preying Mantis egg cases hanging on old okra stalks, tomato stakes, and dead celosia stems. Mowing these down would be totally counterproductive for us, so we leave them standing as long as possible, and when we do eventually need to get them out of the way, we put them in piles on the edges of the woods, where they will still have a chance to hatch and move back out into the fields. This, admittedly, causes us some mental distress; we would like to see everything clean and tidy, tucked away, and mowed down, from an aesthetic perspective. We seem to be programmed to want everything short and out of the way for the winter, but it is really damaging to the natural balance to do so. So we leave it, and we enjoy watching the birds move through the Okra stalks, and nibble seeds off the sunflower stalks. I hope you have a place in your yard that you can maintain a bit wild, so we don't civilize the beauty of nature right out of our world. Thanks for helping our farm maintain balance, and keep the beauty coming.
Sincerely,
Farmer Curtis
