Hope everyone had a safe and festive 4th of July!!! The transition between your Spring and Summer Crops is in full swing now! This is the last week for Sugar Snap Peas but the Green Beans are starting to produce well! We are also saying good bye to cabbage and broccoli (until the Fall) but are welcoming the new additions of Summer Squash and Scallions/Green Onions to the Shares!
It's really always a special thing to me to witness the transitions of the Farm between Spring and Summer! The most "curious" transition to me is to see the changes of the insect populations at the Farm this season!!! If you remember from previous "Farm Happenings" the aphids (a pest insect) were very prevalent this Spring, but I also noticed Lady Bugs and Asian Lady Beetles (both predators of aphids) in numbers I've never seen before. Well, now that the aphid populations are gone (for the time being) I'm seeing a lot of adult Lady Bugs and Asian Beetles laying another round of eggs that will probably not find enough food sources for them all to survive. This season I've also noticed the Painted Admiral Butterflys (a non-pest insect) in very large numbers. It seems like within the last week or so Japanese Beetles have arrived in full force when normally I'd just notice a few trickling in from time to time before the big swarms came. At the Farm they predominately feed on weed species (like Pennsylvania Smart Weed) so I'm not very concerned about their numbers but if you have Rose Bushes, Peach Trees, Hostas or other leafy ornamentals I'd start scouting for them now. An easy treatment for residential use is to just fill a bucket up with water and dish soap. Place the bucket under the infested plant and knock the beetles into the water mixture. One pest that I've seen at the Farm much earlier than normal is the Squash Vine Borer Moth! Typically I don't expect to see them till Mid-August at the earliest but have been seeing a few of them flying around the Summer Squash planting. Next week I will start spraying Dipel (Bt var. kurstaki) which is a bacteria that only harms caterpillars and none of our other insect friends like bees. If anyone has questions about what we spray (all Certified Organic) at the Farm please feel free to send them my way!
Every season I am fortunate enough to get to see first hand how the weather effects how things (plants, insects, animals, etc) appear at the Farm and this has been a very interesting year! I've always wanted to turn the notes I've taken every season (for the last 8 years) into a Phenological Calendar to know when to plant, expect pest insect populations to emerge, etc and I think this winter I'm going to do it! It really won't help anyone else to much except for me at the Farm but with our ever changing weather I think it would be very beneficial moving forward into the future!
Have a great week,
Farmer Ben and the Crew
