Reflections on a Late November Day; 11/19/2020

The ambient noise level of the farm has continued to diminish as the last of  our Jamaican Farmers have headed  home. All of them are looking forward to the warmth ,especially after yesterday which  broke mean with snow on the ground and a high of 34 degrees…..an a breeze.  They are  welcoming the 14 days of Covid quarantine when they  get home. Roy says it’ s is the beer, Netflix, a sofa and not getting up early that looks so inviting. But at the end of that they will all be busy getting crops in the ground for their 2nd season. Roy has grown peanuts for his  coop,  along with  tomatoes, melon, cassava  and recently  he has been doing well with  plum tomatoes and okra.  The  concept of  seeding tomatoes now for transplanting by Christmas sounds otherworldly to me..

We have had a good fall in terms of sales and getting things done that  pile up  all spring and summer before this time of year.      Before surgery I did a pretty good job of getting a lot of the fall servicing of tractors and machinery out of the way  Greenhouse skins were changed out  during the warm  spell we  had the 1st week of November, and the remaining high tunnels have the skins rolled up to the ridge pole on the houses as the greenhouse vegetables have been taken out  for he fall, only a few remain with herbs, lettuce and kale.  The  coming week will be extremely busy  for wholesale (Thanksgiving is much bigger for us than Christmas)  and Jenny will finish up the fall CSA. We are down to some part time greenhouse help, and a skeletal crew of Ray, Peter Jaarsma, Jenny, Anne and Mike. I had shoulder surgery a couple of weeks ago, so that doesn’t really make  me  much more than useless, so I am trying to stay out of the way . The strawberries were weeded, sprayed and ready for mulching. Mike dealt with repair and rehabbing of greenhouses and cleaned up  the woodline, organizing pallet boxes or row cover,  machinery, irrigation accessories  into some semblance of order. Greenhouse supplies have started to roll in for spring 2021 and they have been inventoried and put away.  I  am encouraged that  it looks as though the next 10 days will be snow free, and that we will accomplish more things before the seasonal lockdown we call winter. Again, my  axiom remains that a man in insulated coveralls, a wool  hat , bulky boots and gloves is about 35-40% as effective at accomplishing the same tasks as the guy in shorts and a sweatshirt..  In other words,  it takes  twice as long to do anything in snow and ice. So if you can work on bare ground- even if that  ground is frozen—we view it as a gift. 

Recovering from surgery has me on a diet of reduced activity. It doesn’t take long to embrace that lifestyle for me. Surgeons encourage you to walk to get blood flowing, and I have be doing some very leisurely walking around the home farm. I have always been a fan of November. Most folks are not,,  The pace of things drops a couple of notches. The days shorten, and your energy level is abundant enough to see you through an 8 hour day instead of the 12 hour commitment you  are faced with in July. There is usually very little snow, so  foot travel remains safe and easy. The weeds have  been banished, and the farm gets a positively tidy appearance, pleasing to the  eye  even while disguising the chaotic nature of what we do. We renew a love affair with the wood stove in our kitchen, and  at some point in  November we marvel at the just how much comfort an electric blanket affords us. After sweating it out with  fans, hydration, and bug bitten appendages, we kind of enjoy the encroaching winter and coldness. The November sky   can be clear with spectacular  sunsets  (that you actually have a minute to  stop and look at) or the steel grey clouds can threaten and  chill you. The skeletal remains of basswoods and oaks stand  devoid  of any evidence of green life, and with the exception of very warm days, the squirrels, opossums, and skunks are now spending noticeably more time in their hideouts. The crows move up and down the river in large flocks  traveling from farms to landfills to parking lots. Songbirds and woodpeckers  appear at the birdfeeders in an endless stream of industry, only to fly off to a chosen perch with their lunch. With the leaves off the silver maples along the river we now can see the eagles soaring down the river in search of unsuspecting fish.  When the sun is out the shadows are stunning in the weak light. 

The upside of shoulder surgery this year is that I have  had the time to notice, focus on and acknowledge the beauty of  what surrounds my life. I know that if I was out in the  barn washing russets and packing carrots I wouldn’t rhapsodize about the beauty of November. I would be looking forward to a shower, dry socks , a good stout drink and dinner. But given all we have been through in 2020 to get  this far  without crisis in as good as shape as we are in, I am feeling like I still love November.

Heading Towards Fall: 8:29.20

Melons, corn ,potatoes tomatoes and large sweet onions for French frying …the whole enchilada. The grazing is pretty good around here at mealtimes. It also means that its been awhile since I blogged.

Climate change. Same old shit, different blog.   Although we have been blessed with some rogue showers since the end of July that has kept our crops going,  many of my friends have not. Skip and Liz down on the Rhode Island coastline  had burned up until last weekend with less than .5 of an inch of rain since June 1st,.    That maybe adequate moisture for cactus and agave, but certainly not  helpful to a vegetable farm. And on our sea coast Heron Pond Farm and Brookdale Farm in Hollis  continue to bake. We have been funneling  some tomatoes  and strawberries through the Three Rivers Alliance this season and I have journeyed to Kingston a couple of times and even with the recent fronts moving through they remain rainless. That’s tough stuff, financially and emotionally.  There but for the Grace  of God goes Edgewater Farm. This time, anyway….

Further evidence of a warming climate is that we normally  wrap up our blueberry harvest around August 20th.  This year we leased  an acre of  blueberries on a colder site across town, in the hopes we would be able to supply the Coop and farm stand with blueberries through Labor Day. This year with the sun and   intense  heat and and the strong  demand we were through  picking everything we had access to  by the 15th  of August! More evidence that climate is experiencing wild fluctuations.  That intense heat has flavored this year, driving the Brix content way up (brix being a measurement of the sugars in fruit and vegetables). Tomatoes, corn and melons have especially profited.

The pandemic has exacted a bit of emotional toll and inconvenience on folks here at the farm, but everybody who works  the farmstand has settled into our routine and  just deals with it in a resigned  and cheerful way. I am reminded by the others when I am found maskless where I shouldn’t be. The patrons have settled in  as well. We had some trying moments with contentious individuals when we first opened, and for the first time I had the police serve an order to keep a patron away from the premises. I think it is fair to say that the tedious impact of this pandemic coupled with  a trickle down effect of behaviour patterns  from our federal government  plays into  people feeling a  need to drop with simple common courtesy and respect.  So we had to drop engaging discourse over the issue. In the end it was just easy to say ‘our way or the highway..’

With the shortening days comes the advent of fall. The prospect of not seeing another  90 degree day for a year or so has the field crew back to bringing more layers of clothes to work, a brisker step in their pace  and the return of a little bit of joking and enthusiasm to “getting it done”. The onions are coming in by the truck loads, which is a pleasant surprise after last years disappointment.  So successful  a crop that we are beginning to wonder how we are going to be able to  get them dried off and where to store them! (Not a bad problem to be faced with, mind you..)  All though we still have some things in the greenhouse that will get transplanted out (broccoli, cabbage, table greens, radish..)  the winter cover crops are starting to go in. Late yesterday afternoon I took off  on a tractor to sidedress (fertilize) some fall carrot patches and as I traveled up  Route 12A  I could seed some red leaves on the bottom of the swamp maples, a harbinger of fall.

I too really enjoy this time of year. As I went about the fields in the evening twilight, it was a simple matter of adding a non restrictive sweatshirt to achieve maximum comfort. The air was fresh, the sky cloudless.  And despite some impending shoulder surgery,   I felt the best I have in months..

June 22, 2020 The Pandemic and Life Continues

Here we are at the second day of summer. I thought  that the commanding factor in our summer would continue to be  coronavirus. But the weather has once again made a fool out of me.  Summer broke at the end of May , after snowing on us and remaining too cold to embark on early planting. It turned hot and dry and continues this pattern to the moment. In fact,excessively hot, and now excessively dry. The flow of the Connecticut River speaks to mid August drought conditions and not the first half of June, and the water tables are  diminishing as illustrated by the brooks and vernal streams  that are disappearing. The heat is very dry with air movement, which bodes well for someone owning a camp on the coast or on  a pond, but is very tough on trying to keep the vegetable plants coming along.

To offset what nature is denying us, we  have to irrigate. Its very expensive to deliver  necessary water to the plants.  There is drip irrigation which is very efficient in its delivery, and we utilize it wherever possible, usually under the row mulch in the fields. It also utilizes a lot of plastic , much of which gets annually land filled.  Over head irrigation is very inefficient due to the loss from evapo-transpiration., but very necessary in certain instances like small transplants and the strawberry plants and fruit that suffer mightily as the  temps rise above the mid 80’s. Then there is just the additional problem of  labor management. You hire a crew to plant and harvest with a certain degree of irrigation expected, but in a year like this 20% of the crews labor gets redirected towards trying to save the crop. Irrigation is fossil fuel, specialized machinery, and additional labor. It chews into the bottom line pretty hard.

The heat, especially when its in the 90s just wears the crew down. We are into our strawberry season. The heat brings the fruit on fast, and the demand is there so the time  spent picking strawberries is excessive. Ray and the  guys picked over three tons in three days this past weekend. The heat was  tough. That’s a lot of tonnage when its  harvested one berry at a time.  Hopefully the weather pattern will break in the near future, for both the vegetable crops and the help.

Pandemic protocols are a nuisance and inconvenience for both sales force, customers  and laborers. Things have evolved from being told that we couldn’t open anything at all here in early April except curbside to a completely different model that evolves daily.  I like to think that by wearing it I get some protection, but moreover people recognize  it  as me just trying to be respectful and courteous. Most of the customers have been agreeable, with only a handful trying to make a political statement by showing up without one and complaining. The masks were certainly more comfortable  back in March and April when it wasn’t 90 degrees.  The farmstand crew has just been outstanding in compliance  and understanding the many sides of the issue, and things  have gone smoothly there.  In order to deal with potential problems with required social distancing, we decided to  restrict children under 12 in the  PYO strawberry beds, and we received some blowback over that. I am sympathetic to the fact people want to bring their children, it’s what we have done in the past. But we are trying to make everybody a bit safer by going by  recommended guidelines and what we have learned from extension educators, state health officials and the FDA  about how this thing can potentially spread,   and we have decided this is the appropriate  thing to do until the vaccine is developed or we learn otherwise. We fully understand that a financial hit will be incurred, but again, we mutually feel it is appropriate.

The next time I blog will likely be after the  conclusion of our strawberry season, I hope it will be after we have gotten some good rain  so  my covid  neck mask will be  used more for the purposes of restricting covid from entering my lungs and not the current  primary purpose of keeping my lungs from filling up with field  dust while working on a tractor.

Its strawberry season…tomatoes are close behind!

Looks Cool. Costs a fortune. Doesn’t do nearly as good a job as Mother Nature….

The Farm and The Virus, Ver.2.0

I have just reread my blog of only two weeks ago and I am amazed how far this thing has developed in that time. Now our communities are in full lock down mode, markets are struggling with the uncertainty as much as  home households are.  We have been getting a fair number—very surprising to me-- of calls wondering if we are even going to farm this summer. Which makes me wonder….did they think we would just shut down and go touring the world on vacation?  Perhaps disappear into a cold war bunker with our potatoes and toilet  paper?

This thing,  as you know, got big and got big fast.  Directives and policies from the fed and local level are so fluid that the information changes daily. That  fluidity makes it hard to  plan and set changes in motion for us at Edgewater, especially when it  is in addition to trying to actually  farm. That said, the answer to the question most asked thus far is   “Yes, we are absolutely growing food and flowers this spring and summer.”  We have taken out  the loans, purchased  the plants, seed and fertilizer. As you can see from the picture, stuff has commenced going into the ground.  How we deliver our products safely, efficiently and effectively is very much under discussion and research as of today. If you are a CSA member, Jenny will no doubt be directly in contact with you as things develop. As members of the broader Edgewater Family, we will try to make as much information available to you through our website and on Facebook.

The Cornish Crew getting more maters planted. Mr Hobbes casting a non critical eye towards his Gramps while Mrs Dunkerton basks in the warm sun.

Among the  employees there has been much discussion about how to service  people interested in food production and preservation. Gardening and “putting up” vegetables is a bit of a lost art.   But it is very doable. In order to service that need, we are going to produce some short videos directed primarily towards folks that  have had little past experience in vegetable gardening. Later in the  summer,  Emily will post some demonstrations about food preservation  so that you can not only participate in your own food security but also perhaps discover a worthwhile and enjoyable hobby. Because gardening season is just about on top of the home gardeners, I hope to post the first few  videos on the website  within a week or so….which is about what it will take for this old fossil to figure out how to make and post a video on Facebook…even with help. So keep tuned for that.

Jenny posted on the farm facebook site a PSA (public service announcement) at the very beginning of this outbreak, before folks were even allowed to mention the word “pandemic”. She correctly stated “The plants will grow, the flowers will bloom and there will be great good things to eat”.   You can take that to the bank, because it is what we do.  Period.  So stop worrying that we are disappearing because we ain’t . Lets get some enjoyment out of these early spring sunny days, and know that we are busy down here farming hard, as are all our colleagues. Get yer rakes and  shovels out,  because  irregardless of any snow, spring is right around the corner. Franklin Roosevelt aptly said that ‘the only fear, is fear itself”. Now get busy, stop worrying and don’t hoard toilet paper.

March Blog: Virus and Early Spring on the Farm

Queen Roswell in her hand crafted and fitted matronly garb. Fashioned from shiny bubble wrap insulation…

Welcome to the spring blog from good old Edgewater. There is lots of new developments in everyones’ lives and we here are not exempt. Through most of this I have tried to adopt the “What, me worry?” attitude of the esteemed Alfred E Neumann. But between the quarantine, daily press conferences at the white House, tanking of the stock market and the media, institutional  and private business shut downs and   obsession of media to discuss  and  dissect every  aspect of it…..well….. I had to pull my head out of the sand.  We have to deal with it.

Usually we are obsessed with the weather. Which has been pretty easy on us.   Having a driveway and dooryard (and fields) that are dry by St. Patrick’s Day is a gift to us, if not the ski industry. We are getting the flowers and vegetables  growing in the greenhouses, and the lack of snow continues to allow us to gets lots of high tunnels and greenhouses fitted up for the tomatoes and cucumbers. Our greenhouse and early field crew is pretty much all present and keeping abreast of the daily tasks this time of year. Of course, with educational institutions shut down we  have at least 4 individuals under the age of 7 here every day.  That in itself takes a bit of juggling, but it comes with some comic relief. Today we had Roswell all decked out in Queenly garb  that was designed on the spot from packing insulation (see pertinent photo). It can be pretty humorous to watch the pack of little ones pursue their serious ministrations…if you can only  figure out what it is they are actually trying to accomplish.

Big Boss Man and the daily ritual of the Chicken Herding.

We are trying to get our social distancing on as we work among ourselves and  following all health protocols  that are applicable and adaptable. On a farm this is probably easier to do than in an office space, which is good because  we certainly do not have the luxury of shutting down in the interim or collecting unemployment. Many farmers are struggling to understand if they should be adopting different cropping and marketing strategies.  Should they emphasize and shift focus to less perishable fall crops? What if the states close down farmers markets because they constitute gathering of more than 50 people? (some states have…) How do we deliver the goods in a retail arena? In a wholesale arena? Delivery, packaging…?  How can we insure that as food providers we do not contribute to the problem?  These are becoming real issues and considerations as the repercussions from this pandemic develop.

One of the very specialized tools we use in producing those beautiful hanging baskets…..

For the moment we are just going to do what we do.  We are going with our normal crop mix, in the proportions that we have in the past, and assume that the markets ultimately will perform similarly for us. Our current crew can get the stuff grown and transplanted into  the field, but we are concerned about what happens during strawberry season and beyond if we cannot get our H2A workers into the country. These gents have been here for many years, they know the system, they know the ropes. This will be Roy’s 20th year with us. He is de-facto management. Many of my colleagues are trying to address these challenge, but as everything is so fluid at the moment the outcome is difficult to   envision with any degree of rational certainty. My crystal ball is full of murky, muddy water on this issue.

So we here are adopting the directive from Admiral Farragaut at the battle of Mobile Bay in the Civil War when he demanded: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”  We have bought the seeds, supplies and ordered up the fertilizer. All the old field trucks are getting their annual inspection at Plainfield Auto.  Tractors are  coming to life and out of their winter mothballs. As Jenny says…”The sun will shine, the ground will warm, and things will grow,. “   We will have plants for your garden and food for you to eat.The pandemic will be what it will be. In the meantime stay calm, patient and don’t be overcome by the anxiety generated from the media talking heads and politicos. Instead, listen to the Talking Heads…or Merle Haggard..or Mozart or Beethoven. Read a book. Better yet, go outside and rake the lawn on these beautiful early spring days. . And be realistic about how much toilet paper you really are going to use in the next year.

POOH TALKS: DEAD OF WINTER

TAKE IT AWAY POOH:

On behalf of all of us, greetings for another year, another growing season. The lengthening days herald a warning that too soon the work days will get dramatically longer, and the leisurely weekend pace will be utterly and totally abandoned. My Dad once remarked how it would be nice being a vegetable and small fruit farmer as we would have “our winters free”, but there was only a small element of truth to that, especially after our children were born. I worked as a weekday ski patroller at Mt Ascutney and spent a year in the rental shop for 14 years. It worked out great when the farm was smaller. When the ground froze, the snow mounted up I could go to work at the mountain and draw a little pay. I actually had a lot of fun patrolling (mostly the skiing part) and met great folks with whom I never would have met in farming circles. After February school vacations had wrapped up and when area attendance started dropping, the management was more than happy to see me excuse myself to come back to farming activities. Despite surrendering my right ACL to my winter job, I do look fondly upon those days. But those were the old days. The farm is much bigger and busier now. There is much more than ever to do during the winter. Paperwork, taxes, seed orders, cutting from stock plants, H-2A petitions. Piles of desk work. Anne is welded to the desk, juggling figures and filing forms. She used to be the fastest green bean picker in the state (or so I bragged). Now a river of bureaucratic and financial obligations and forms spill out of the farm office onto the kitchen table, into the old home office and then into the guest bedroom. It’s a shit cart load of personal notes, bank statements, forms, audits, and surveys to be filled out and filed, and its all very time consuming to mop up. She does the lion’s share of it. Not the kind of picturesque responsibility one thinks of when one thinks of farming. (She does get to lord over her cut flowers and greenhouse with Sarah, so she is not desk bound all year long…) Other winter chores include (but are not limited to) greenhouse repair and maintenance, machinery and shop maintenance, packing out root vegetables until stores are depleted, organizing all manner of soils, pots and flat filling for spring, brush cutting, building repair, seed orders, blueberry and raspberry pruning when weather allows, lining up crop insurance and getting the principals who work here year round vacation and family during holidays and the dead of winter ( note: “dead of winter” is an oxymoron now, it is never dead, there is always something that needs attendance…either immediately or in the future) The winter thus far has been very benevolent to us. January is wrapping up a bit on the warm side with bountiful sun which is a godsend for the stock plants who are trying to produce cutting material for this ornamental spring season, and it has been gentle on the propane consumption. The absence of ice in the dooryard is welcomed by all of us, but especially my 69 year old shoulders which are currently missing a few tie rods. The small amount of snow has allowed us to get our blueberries pruned, a task that has been left unattended for the past two years. It has been easier for Mike to rebuild the doors on our elderly greenhouses. Pete and Dave are almost finished with packing out winter potatoes. Coupled with this is the take down of the greenhouse at Putnams and brought back to the home farm to be resurrected with 3 new ones. The only thing negative that I have any concern about is the lack of snow cover for insulation for strawberries. Lack of snow cover makes George, our tillage and tractor guy, get itchy to get to get underway. Although he knows it all too well after 88 winters, I have to remind him that we still have a lot of winter yet to wade through . But thus far the winter has been a gift, and the preponderance of sunny days keeps our spirits high. As February rolls around we start to try to line up our labor needs and positions. Petitions have to be filed to get our H2A workers from Jamaica back in the spring. By all accounts they are having good season and have remained safe from all the earthquake activity in the Caribbean. Applications have to be addressed and interviews have to be scheduled…an ordeal that takes time and is a juggling act at best. We will have to review all our food safety and employee training manuals and update them. Vacations are wrapped up and in February we start to get committed to seeding perennials, herbs, more cuttings and by March 1st four greenhouses will be fired up and on line. By the end of February-at least as far as we are concerned and irregardless of the weather and amount of snow on the ground-spring will have come to Edgewater Farm.

POOH TALKS: DOWN ON THE FARM WITH CLIMATE CHANGE

Anyone who follows the blog has heard time and time again me discuss how weather is one of the major

deciding factors in determining success or failure in a growing season. Last week we hosted a climate

change meeting at our farm sponsored by Valley Food and Farm, a subset of Vital Communities. The title

of the series was “Fostering Resilient Agriculture in a Changing Climate”. Not the first time I have been

involved in conferences or discussions on climate change, I think this was number five for me. Last

week’s meeting was attended by some educators, some media, a few farmers and Chris Skoglund from

NH DES whom tried to explain the science part of climate change. Sadly there was not enough time

allotted to really turn him loose; he tried to explain a lot of concepts in a very short period of time.

My question is this “why we are trying to convince people in this day and age that climate change is a reality?”

POOH SPRAGUE TALKING CLIMATE CHANGE ON THE FARM

This past March, Steve Wood of Poverty Lane and I had a dog and pony show at a local retirement

community. Because Steve spoke so well and explained the challenges that have confronted agriculture

in the last 40 years-specifically as a grower of tree fruit- I thought I needed to add nothing to that part

of the conversation. I veered and discussed how climate change has effected the ski areas and

winter recreational industry. A lifelong skier and full time professional ski patroller for 13 winters at Mt

Ascutney Ski gives me some perspective. I referenced a website called

Lost Ski Areas of New England that chronicles and references all the ski areas that opened and

ultimately closed their doors for business. Do you realize at one time there were surface lifts on the

Alexandria side of Cardigan Mountain? There are many reasons for the consolidation of the ski

industry, but certainly the lack of dependable winter weather conditions-lack of natural snow, warming

temps and winter rain events etc .etc. has to be the most important reason. I was amazed to see that in

the room of 30 interested seniors there were those who asked questions of us that would indicate that

this was somehow news to them. Some referenced our current Presidents position on the issue, and

stated surprise and disbelief. I have lived my life in the outdoors, but I was nonplussed that any

person whom had lived a reasonably normal life couldn’t just obviously see the weather pattern

changes over the period of their lifetimes.

George Hamilton of UNH University Extension and a tree fruit and vegetable specialist for our state

summed it up best for me when he said it’s not only the change in the weather that is important, but

the extremes we are experiencing in our seasonal weather that make up those averages. We know now

that every frontal system in New England summer weather is potentially a hail event. A rarity 40 years

ago, now many of us invest in crop insurance for the valuable crops. The 500 year floods have occurred

4 times in my 68 year lifetime. If any more ice melts off Greenland the real estate folks are going to start

carving up beach front lots. Al Gore called it an “inconvenient truth” which it is, no matter whether you

prescribe to being a republican, a democrat or a fundamentalist. To me the discussion should center on

not if its happening or not. If you think it is not happening, I would submit that your powers of

observation of the natural world that surrounds you is less than myopic, perhaps qualifying for some

sort of Mr Magoo award. It’s 2019. Are we still trying to convince rational people that climate change-

which exists for whatever reason- is afoot? And maybe we should be advancing the discussion to what

we should be doing about it?

Couple of things that we do here that accommodates climate change over the years: We increasingly

move high value vegetable crops into greenhouses and unheated high tunnels. High tunnels are

greenhouse frames with poly coverings, but are passive without heat or ventilation. We do our

beefsteak tomatoes in both high tunnels and a couple of heated greenhouses for season extension, but

due to the high value of the crop we like to be able to protect them from the extreme winds when

trellised upward and in case of a hail event with a thunderstorm. We still grow our cherry, grape and

paste tomatoes in the field. The high tunnels allow us protection and season extension with other crops

as well; cucumbers, late fall greens, ginger and occasionally peppers. Again, climate change manifests

and endangers crops with its extremes, so while we may garner protection from the elements, we also

can capitalize on season extension. In the field we have changed and altered our tillage practices and

soil management practices in regards to cover cropping. 2010 and 2011 were hard lessons learned with

extreme rain events in the summer and early fall. We experienced field erosion unlike anything we had

seen before, and that mandated some changes. The plus side of the climate change adaptations

we make, is that we believe, the soil health is benefitting. Deep and minimum tillage, permanent cover crops and the machines to achieve and maintain better soil structure and health have been a focus of ours.

We are not scientists, but family farmers who are painfully aware of climate change. Our lives in the

outdoors tells us something is afoot, regardless of whether it is carbon dioxide emmision or gods will.

It is difficult to confront people who adamantly disbelieve and argue against what is an inconvenient

truth and would rather politicize the discussion. What we try to do down on the farm to address

climate change is akin to tilting at windmills in terms of impact. But at the end of the day, these changes

and adaptive practices make us feel that we acknowledge climate change, thus making us better

farmers as well as planetary citizens.

POOH TALKS: A ROW OVER ROUND UP, CHEESEBURGERS, AND "3000 YEARS OF ANNUAL GENETIC SELECTION"

Because we are not a certified organic farm we often get to field questions about  the crop techniques we use in crop production, frequently in how we deal with pests and  our control techniques which often require the use of agricultural chemicals. Oftentimes it is usually a matter of curiosity for our patrons or they may be experiencing a problem in their gardens. Sometimes it is with alarm in their voice and concern for what they perceive we may be doing to the environment, so we try to answer candidly and transparently.  Recently there has been an uptick in the concern over a chemical known to the public as Roundup.  I say at the outset of this  blog my discussion should in no way be construed as advocacy for chemical use,  but maybe as a vehicle to better understand what Roundup is, how it works, and how we use it . And again, I am not a chemist. I don’t clearly understand about molecular bonding or the relevance of the P orbital in chemistry.  I am just trying to create a favorable environment for a tomato or strawberry plant. Most of what I know is what I read from the EPA about ag chemicals trade journals or the internet. 

For starters, Roundup is a trade name.  The actual chemical itself is glyphosate, and the Roundup is  41% glyphosate and the balance of the product are inert substances-water, mineral oil, mineral powders etc). Glyphosate is available from many chemical companies, but marketed and labeled as a generic glyphosate in a 41% solution.  A parallel example would be Advil, which is a trade name for the active ingredient ibuprofen.  The rest of the pill is made up of inert ingredients to hold the pill together, perhaps a few buffering agents to reduce the risk of stomach irritation.  And like glyphosate, ibuprofren is sold by many different manufacturers and trade labels.  Rite Aid, CVS and Walmart have their own labels. 

Roundup, has been around  in agriculture since the 70’s. Yes, we have and continue to periodically use it here on the farm. It is known as a systemic herbicide, which means it actually gets taken up by the plant into the vascular system, and translocates through the tissue to all parts of the plant on a cellular level and eventually the plant sickens and dies. Many of the fruit and vegetable growers in the northeast singularly use this when  opening up sod ground to prepare for planting. It is called a broad spectrum herbicide, which means it works on a wide range of plants. For us, it is particularly effective on the pesky  weed  “quack grass” or also known as “witchgrass”.    (See elytrigia repens in Google)  It most likely is a pest for you as well in your perennial  beds and borders. This weed is resilient, persistent and the only successful and practical method  for organic culture is fallowing the ground for a year (you can go to Google for ”fallowing”  as well). The problem with fallowing  it that it has shown to be a practice that is harmful to soil structure, soil flora and fauna and burns precious carbon.  So until something better emerges,  periodic use of glyphosate seems  preferable in our soil management practices here on the farm.  Lest you think that it gets us out of hoeing the berries and vegetables and pulling weeds…think again. But it  does get rid of quack grass for us prior to planting, and that is huge. 

Additionally glyphosate is pretty safe to use for the applicator, with low chronic and acute toxicity.  Homeowners can buy premixed gallon applicators at the box store, hardware store or garden center (not ours) to surgically spray those pesky weeds that dare show up in the  cracks of the driveway pavement.  So it has  a widespread application, and therein the problem begins.

My first gallon of Roundup came to the farm in the late 1970’s. It was manufactured by the company BASF. My experience prior with BASF was that one of the company’s  products was magnetic recording tape (remember vinyl records,  reel-to-reel  tape recorders and analog generated music?) BASF was the music industry’s go-to product in the recording studios. No matter, we used their Roundup to reduce the quack grass problems prior to planting our strawberries.  It  was easy for the handler, and it worked like magic on the quack grass. Somewhere in the  80’s Monsanto purchased the company from BASF and the fun began. They initiated  a R and D  program to genetically create corn, soybean, and grains that were resistant to Roundup ( I think a line of potato varieties as well, but not sure on that. But I will bet that 90% of the tofu in the American markets is made from GMO soybeans).The business model not only sold gobs of Roundup as weed control ,  but they could also sell farmers all the seed to go with it. It was a very big deal and, of course, America was going to feed the world as well as make farmers money.   But if you follow any money, you start to find a lot of lawyers along the way. All the GMO  stuff was very tightly controlled and proprietary to Monsanto, such that you had to sign binding legal agreements  with them to not “save seed” and were required to use Monsantos’ Roundup before you were even allowed to buy the herbicide. Monsantos’  legal department even went so far as to try to prosecute next door neighbors whom had traditionally saved their own seed, even if they were organic and never had bought a thing from  Monsanto. In highly publicized court cases, it often pitted Monsantos’ legal team against smaller family farms who saved seed from year to year under the aegis that the farmers were indirectly using and profiting from Monsantos Technology  and expensive research and development when non-monsanto grains accidentally cross pollinated with Monsanto products.   And, in a few cases, they actually made that argument stick in court. It was a surprise to me to hear of it, but then again, the Midwest is America’s commodity ag belt, and there is a different politic out there than there is in New England. Globally, Monsanto marched into the Mideast and Africa and hard-sold their program to local farmers. Promising success (as well as high cost of inputs) they enlisted many farmers into their grains programs only to have the farmers realize that the Monsanto GMO varieties could not compete perform in these alien geographic regions, and in many cases came up short in comparison to the varieties that had  been used from saving seeds by local farmers for generations. All they ended up with was a big bill from seeds and Roundup.

About 10 years ago  I had a conversation with a local farmer in Guatemala who was growing  about 4 acres of the local “holy trinity”;  corn, dried bean, and okra.  He farmed by hand on a hillside. He had a beautiful ornamental garden by his house, and a part time job guiding tourists into a cave with Mayan artifacts on his property. In conversation I asked him if he had ever considered trying some different  varieties of dried bean from America (see your Johnny’s Select Seed catalog, the section on dried beans)  and he turned to me and said “Why would I want to turn my back on 3000 years of annual genetic selection?”  It took me 20 minutes to get my foot out of my mouth..

Monsanto went about its business of selling hard (and successfully) a bag of goods to global ag. Suffice to say, it’s hard to imagine the quantity of Roundup that was (and is) continually being sprayed on land year after year in our Midwest alone. I return to the parallel example of Roundup and Advil. There can be benefit for me if I take some Advil. I sleep more comfortably on the beaten up shoulders and back if I take a couple of Advil at bedtime, and when I yank or twist something, it really helps in pain management. But Doc says if I take too much, my kidneys are not going to be too happy.  Additionally, I love a good fast food cheeseburger (man does not live by kale alone) and  a good Irish whiskey. But if I saturate my body with either of them I stand a pretty good chance of ending up with some undesirable side effects. My feeling is the same about glyphosate. When I feel it’s the best choice for a problem, I am greatful to have it. But Monsanto has taken  that product and made farmers-world-wide dump an unimaginable amount of that product into the environment. And there are bound to be problems when something is used that ubiquitously and in such quantity. And truthfully, Monsanto has not gone out of its way to make many friends in its quest for marketshare, and that has generated negative press. All giving “Roundup” a lot of attention and press. 

Most people who ask questions about our farming practices and us of applications don’t really know what Roundup or glyphosate is. They cannot tell you what GMO stands for. I understand that as I oftentimes don’t even know the acronyms that the USDA lays on us farmers.  But perhaps glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) suffers a bit by being misunderstood,  and more from the fact that Monsanto generated so much  bad press by its aggressive  marketing department and its proprietary behaviors.  It’s a vortex of many issues. It is going to be even more complicated going forward. The other day an ag extension agent informed that the giant chemical corporation Bayer (Think of  aspirin.  Aspirin isn’t all they make..) just gobbled up Monsanto in a merger/acquisition. I didn’t realize they were that big..but evidently in comparison they are Goliath to Monsanto’s David.   Time will tell us whether they are  going to be better global citizens.

 Or not..

“Viva, Las Vegas” at the farm

 I had a colleague, Larry Allen who farmed and Westminster and one time  he told me he had no interest in attending a grower conference in Las Vegas. I asked him if the glitz and gambling held no interest for him and he responded   “I don’t need to be reminded that  I gamble gobs of money every time I fire up a tractor and head to the field”.

This has certainly been a challenging season for farmers in the northeast. Our farm is no exception. Of course, weather is the big trump card in the game. When the weather is uncooperative, you start taking risks to accommodate the problems the weather creates. All standard management  practices can be can be cast  aside  and you can step up and put your money down.

An example from this spring would be during transplant season, which was very damp and very cold. We were behind schedule with getting spring transplants in the ground because the weather was uncooperative and we came up short on labor during the season; due to injuries and labor demands in the greenhouses. Ray would go gangbusters getting stuff out when the few opportunities between labor and weather allowed,  and the dampness of the spring initially worked in our favor, because we  didn’t need to set up irrigation. Normally we  put out a lot of row cover on our vines and pepper transplants to keep them warm and give them climate protection. Because we had so much transplant material backed up in the greenhouse, we opted to not take the time instilling row covers, but rather to get the transplants out before they got too big. We knew if the weather broke hot we would be additionally managing those row covers daily.  It looked like a great idea on paper, but then two things happened.  First , the spring continued cold and damp. The row covers could have warmed those plant environs and pushed the plants along, and we would have captured an earlier harvest.  Instead, when the weather did break  we had  two days of hot weather with wind. The peppers got beaten to hell and set back. They finally recovered,  but fruited later than normal.  The risk we took…

Onions are an important crop for us. So in 2018 we consciously made an effort to exercise a  best management practice  to insure success with  the 2019 onion  crop. We took a couple acres out of our “good” ground and  put in two cover crops of peas and oats to build some humus and break  any disease cycles that might be there. Additionally,  there was no tillage to  oxidize any existing  humus or  organic matter.  That is pretty much textbook   J. I. Rodale organic practices. We should be rewarded, correct?

This year, we spaded in the residue into the soil, fertilized, prepped and planted  two acres of singulated onion transplants from the greenhouse (approx. 35,000 transplants). We stood back to watch the money grow. They looked darn  good  for a couple of weeks.  Cool and damp…onions like that  too,  while they are getting established. Then some started to die.  Areas of the field showed stress. The problem was that by not tilling the soil last year and  adding all the organic matter, it gave the  root  wire worms   (think the little guys who burrow into your potatoes in the garden)  a chance to establish a strong hold in the field, and they were living on onion roots. We lost over 60% of the onion crop right out of the gate. Basically because we  were trying to do the right thing by our soils and crops. Who knew?

We stepped up to the roulette wheel with our strawberry crop as well.  The winter of 2018-19  was brutal on the strawberries. The snow came in early November and although  the plants saw daylight in January for a couple of weeks (not good either) they  basically remained caked in ice until May 1st (very late to uncover plants)  They were not the strongest plants going into the winter, and they were verily hammered coming out of it. The weak plants started blooming profusely and heavily in mid to late May, and there were no leaves to support the fruit load. We were confronted with a season of picking strawberries the size of small blueberries. Trade publications rail against fertilizing strawberries in the spring, mostly for the fact that it makes them more susceptible to disease. Confronted with the possibility of a non crop,   we opted to go against convention and hit them with every nutrient  we could think of  to bolster their development. Nitrogen,  potassium,  even seaweed extract…we nuked ‘em. The first fruit looked discouragingly small. But about a week in with some warm weather  the plants really started to respond and the fruit sized up.  Our 2019 crop  was not a winner by any stretch,  but at least we were able to have a crop to  service all our accounts properly and provide some  pick your own as well. By utilizing  the wrong strategy we produce a better outcome.  It could  have backfired that the weather turned wet and damp and the fruit would have instantly turned to grey mush, but we gambled, and it work out to some advantage.  

Elsewhere it is the usual succession of successes and failures. Tomatoes are a workhorse crop for us, and they are doing well growth wise and sales wise.  Good crop of  people  for the farmstand sales force,  and the stand looks tip top whenever I go by on my way to the kitchen to see if Emily has any blueberry scones left over..  A good hardworking  field crew doing battle daily, anchored by an aging Jamaican team. Long  as they make ibuprofren and CBD oil,  they (and we) will go on forever.  George still drives up from Bradford NH daily (at 88) to keep the tillage and mowing under control for us. (Also repairs window sash on the older homes) . Keeping  our noses down during these hot steamy spells, watching the potatoes grow daily and looking forward to the cooler times.  Along with the daily planning , scheming and gambling…

Pooh Talks: a winter of too much paperwork, and too much coffee, before heading into greenhouse season

I am  sitting here with a coffee cup laced with sugar and cream . The polar vortex is winding up once again outside with predicted high temps of the mid teens. This change came on the heels of 3 days of almost  40 degree temps and a big rain event. I am descending into my funk because I was hoping  for a better glimpse of mud-season these last days of February and not this. 

Remember the song by the British band the Kinks in the 1960’s titled “Enjoy yourself, It’s Later than You Think”?  It plays in my mind as I contemplate the upcoming growing season, which, by some strange twist of chronological fate, is at hand.  There are rooted cuttings galore in the propagation house and the tomatoes are up and chugging along. Long season ornamentals like begonias and lisianthus are in trays and today’s calendar tells me its time to seed artichokes.   Ray, Jenny and Mike will finish up the last round of vacations this week and we open a house to start seeding the onions next week….that will  signal “game on” as  Anne and Sarah will start to bring on the greenhouse crew. Then we will officially be off to the races.

As I look out the window I contemplate the challenges for us the upcoming season.  Right now there is a snow squall blowing through, a harbinger of the day’s plummeting temperatures. Weather will be a huge challenge again for the Edgewater Farm crew as well as all my agricultural colleagues.  My friend Mike Smith once remarked that farmers  are a pretty clever lot. We can grow crops in the desert, and we can grow things in a swamp. Here in New England the problem is that we just don’t know which one of those situations will confront us in the upcoming growing season.  Anybody that says what is going on meteorologically is not climate change simply has his head in the sand or doesn’t want to be assessed additional taxes to try and combat it. From my perspective the discussion should be not whether it is a reality, but what we should be doing about it. In addition, we have to factor in the reality that there are going to be a higher percentage of crop loss over the course of the season.  Drought, high wind, excessive rain, hail, extreme changes in temperature all can reduce and even eliminate yields.  Thus, we have to strategize weather as a more integral component of our crop rotations. And then hope for a decent outcome.

Labor is huge challenge for everyone in the farming industry. We are more and more dependent on our H2A farming crew from Jamaica every year. Last year we vetted 5 individuals -local Americans- for the field crew. No one showed up for the first day, and only 2 notified us that they  were not coming.  We are still trying to get used to the concept of the 30 hour work week which results in the training and managing more bodies. We have a good core crew of folks returning this year to the farm stand, greenhouses and kitchen, but most do not work a 40 hour week. This presents management problems for us, as we are responsible for so much mandated training by the government as well a scheduling nightmare for our folks managing those separate areas of the farm.  We have an aging workforce for the field crew, and even our professional force from Jamaica is getting older;  we have be sensitive to that. I am 68, for better or worse semi functional and working a 50 plus hour week during the season. And then there is George. During the spring he is doing pretty close to 40 hours a week and taking care of most of our primary tillage and tractor work. He drives up daily back and forth to Bradford with his lunch bucket  (extra brownies for me when available) and  Perry Como CDs which he  punches into the tractor CD player and goes about his business of  doing our business. He is 88 this year.  So we have to look at  our aging workforce and be sensitive to the challenges of that. Last year we ended up at the  beginning of the season with 66% of the number of bodies for the field crew that we figured we needed, and went all summer that way. Many things were left unattended, but our crew did yeoman’s duty out there and we had more accomplished by the time they headed south to Jamiaca on the first of November than I could have possibly hoped for.  We will continue looking for qualified earnest people to help us with the hard work of farming, but we will also be looking at ways to mechanize and capitalize  on efficiencies.  

Compliance.  I often say that if I knew that farming was so much compliance and documentation, I would have chosen the Elvis Tribute Band offer as a career choice. Most all of my colleagues- like myself - got into farming because they wanted to work outdoors in the environment. See things grow, visibly see jobs accomplished. Produce something tangible of value. As I push forward towards 50 years of doing this, I find that I am as much an HR person as I am a grower.

pooh leading up our HR department

This year’s really big challenge will be our first FSMA inspection.  For several years we have felt that much of what is being required of farms going forward  towards FDA compliance really does little to actually improve food safety. However  it does  generate documentation for inspection, provides jobs  for well intentioned people staring at screens somewhere in  the bowels of an FDA center in DC. I had an  FDA “mock”  inspection last fall and the number of clipboards needed to record documentation on our farm went from  three to eleven(11) . And I am not sure that there wont be more by the time I am actually inspected. That is all just training field employees, protocols for growing, harvesting, washing and packing.  Health and hygiene training….. a yearly event for all workers.    Tracking cooler temps, testing sanitizer in the wash-line and documenting it, and on and on.  Worker Protection Standard for employees?   Yearly  (The farmstand doesn’t come under FSMA because it is direct retail and falls under NH Health and Human Service)  which is another agency. It is a lot of  training and  paperwork for the privilege of growing greenhouse tomatoes, cukes  and strawberries.  And it will eat up a lot of time before the inspector show up. 

There are many challenges not yet on the table. Nutrient management programs.  Vermont has a program that makes all agricultural enterprises in that state record their cultural practices while setting parameters and protocols for fertilization and manure handling and the attendant documentation going with it. I have no doubt that it is coming to a Live Free of Die state near you some time in the future.  Again, it is not a bad idea that this fertilizer and  manure management is regulated. But its another layer of documentation.   It is essentially, another expense. 

Recently I had the unenviable task of appearing at a statehouse ag committee meeting , to testify on behalf  of pesticides. I am loath to testify on behalf of any pesticide use, but did so  because I was asked by my trade groups, and appeared as one of many farmers. The woman who introduced it was a retired nurse from an  urban area  and  was an avid gardener, and she had determined that the absence of pollinators in her gardens was attributable to agricultural chemicals, and she was looking to get them banned from the state.  It is not easy for me to advocate against her sentiment, misguided and flawed as I thought her logic may  be.  But the reality is if you ban them in NH, you put me at a disadvantage in the marketplace with Quebec, Vermont, Massachuesetts and Maine having access to them and not letting me use the same toolbox.  I am perfectly happy with the prospect of farming without agricultural chemical.  We employ  a lot of sound organic practices here on the farm currently.   Take chemicals away? I would embrace it. We would be willing to take our chances against large growers. I know how to farm organically.   But it has to be a level playing field. And by the way, much of the ag chemicals that I have a license to purchase can be bought off the shelf and used by homeowners at any Home Depot, Lowe’s, feed store or garden center. It is disingenuous to look at the local farmer as the sole person responsible for misuse of ag chemical. Homeowner use ought to be scrutinized as well.

The remaining challenge is the one that faces us every year. It is a multi faceted problem.   How to balance ones life against the demands of the season?  Find time to spend with your kids during the summer?  How do we continue to do what we do and  maintain a certain quality of life? How do we avoid burning out on the job, or worse yet, how do we avoid stress injuries and physical therapy appointments from repetitive motion? How do we balance and empower healthy employee relationships with a workforce that encompasses a wide  diversity of differing interests, ages, genders, and cultures?

If you have some solutions to the problems above, we would love to hear about them. Or, you can have my job dealing with them. I just want to go outside, work in the soil and grow crops…..

Pooh Talks: soil health, early winter, and very casually throws in a "BTW"

“Excuse Me Mr. Sprague, it is not dirt we are studying. Dirt is what your mother washes off your pants in the washing machine. It is what she sweeps up in the kitchen if you do not leave your boots in the mudroom. We are studying soils, and they merit your respect.”

—Nobel Peterson PhD, addressing me (down) in my introductory soils course at UNH in 1971.

Recently there was an article in the valley news about a horse farmer in Vermont. One of the things that she touts about is using horses and that a horse has a low impact on the soil, and it fits into her organic paradigm really well. There has been a lot of research on soil health in the last 5 years, a lot is a direct spin off of Warren Buffett’s farmer/son committing a lot of personal assets towards research. The USDA and FSA have gotten involved in additional research and funding as well. As a result, more research has gone into understanding and supporting the understanding of soil structure, chemistry and flora and fauna, and getting much of that information out to practicing farmers.

Some of this goes into the category of “what is old is new again”. There was certainly a large body of research and methodology available to farmers in the first half of the twentieth century. Much came from European understanding and origin, but there were those in America who espoused and promoted it such as JI Rodale and writer Louis Broomfield. However, starting in the late 1940s, much of those practices were abandoned in favor of conventional chemical farming which enabled farmers to magnify yields very easily, and better yet, profitably. It really wasn’t until the “back to the land movement” of the 1970s when organic practices came back into vogue, that soil began to be empirically investigated. The downsides of conventional and chemically based practices were starting to become apparent. Maine’s own Eliot Coleman became the primary spokesperson for the movement for the boomer generation of farmers. But much of the old knowledge had been lost or buried. I remember, as a member of the Vermont Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, going to a meeting and Verne Grubinger introducing us to the concept and benefits of adding hairy vetch for nitrogen production in our winter cover crops. I got all fired up with this new information. I thought Verne had come up with this stuff, and soon all of us were adding hairy vetch to the mix. About five years ago I was reading a 1932 Blue Seal Feed pocket calendar, which the feed companies also supplemented with info like weights, animal gestation periods, feed blends for specific animal production as well as seeding rates for grains and legumes. Guess what? They were recommending 15 lbs of hairy vetch seed mixed with every bushel of winter rye. For nitrogen production. In 1932. Cool….

So people who work the forest and fields for a living are beginning to have a better reverence and appreciation for their soils, and a better understanding of what can support the chemical and biological activity therein. We have worked proactively the past 15-20 years to understand and implement practices that are less invasive and more supportive. We have always been disciples of cover cropping and recently I was lucky enough to be involved with an NRCS 2 year study looking at tillage innovations, practices as well as cover crop seed mixes. I thought I was pretty up to date and doing a good job, but it’s also pretty exciting to have all this new information before us, and it will assuredly impact our future cropping practices on our farm. And equally exciting is the fact that it is not just us old hippy farmers or the homesteader and her horse in Vermont who are embracing this new info. It’s large dairy and commodity farmers as well. So where I am often despondent about what is happening and coming out of our executive and legislative branches in our federal government, I am equally uplifted by what I see happening in American Agriculture as farmers look at their soils as a prized resource and committing anew to treat it that way.

For those of you that haven’t noticed already: Winter came, and it came too damn early. I haven’t taken a digger on the ice going across the yard to the dumpster yet, but there is still plenty of time before Christmas to do so. I navigate the icy footing by walking bow legged for stability, which makes me look like either a small child with a load in his diapers or an old geezer trying not to get his noggin cracked open from a fall. Wait a minute. I am an old geezer. Well, even the millennials around here don’t care very much for the winter thus far. Dry cold is one thing, but a hand tool with snow on it is just an unpleasant experience no matter what. We are struggling to get our strawberries mulched, but there is enough glaciated snow in the berry field so it is hard to tell if you are actually spreading mulch on the plant rows or in between the rows. This is known as “let’s do something even if it’s wrong” farming. We have no time to do it in the spring, and its super hard getting around the field now with a 4 wheel drive tractor…so …it’s now or never…

And we are in the middle of greenhouse repairs. Mike has lifted up and restructured our first two tomato houses with taller ground stakes to make them two feet higher. The gable ends are being reconstructed and winter snow cover hampers him as well. Ray is still packing out root crops for wholesale and working on seed orders. We are all grateful that our new pack and storage barn is up. The miserably cold temps in November would have assuredly frozen our root crops if they were stored in bins in pole barns as we had done in the past. Having the washer indoors with a bit of heat is making it luxurious to wash and pack out compared to what we would have had faced with in the old pack-shed.

As we are closing in on year’s end we are closing up books in preparation for taxes and visiting with the accountant. People always ask ”How did you do?” or “Was it a good year?” Well, we were set up a bit behind the 8 ball with a mediocre strawberry season due to deteriorating weather conditions in the last half of the season so there wasn’t much profitability there. Drought like conditions for most of the summer (remember the drought? Before the monsoons of October and November?) made growing things difficult, but we fared better than some of my friends and colleagues. Best of all, we had one of the best and harmonious work crews that I can remember in 45 years of doing this. I can not tell you how huge that is for all of us. So, no banner year with a new skid steer for us in the door yard. But good enough to make payments, have a nice Christmas and want to fire the whole thing up and get going again for 2019. (BTW, geranium cuttings for 2019 are on the rooting bench) It never ends, it just seamlessly segues into the next growing season…

Our family continues to enjoy good health and many blessings, among which is the community support for our farm and what we do. In as much as we wish you the best holiday season, we personally thank you for your patronage and moral support.

Pooh Talks: Fall on the farm

That summer went by pretty quickly. A personal first for me: I didn’t know the stand was closing for the season until 10 days before it happened. Usually I have it on my calendar by Labor Day and start praying for a frost alternately to break up  the grind. This year has just gone by so quickly and it is not just the old guy in the room, all the help is kind of in shock. Is it really the middle of October already??

The weather contributed to the illusion. The first half of September was brutally hot, with temperatures that made us think that mid July had returned with a vengeance. The drought returned and the static level of the Connecticut River was as low as I have ever seen it in my lifetime here. I had been vigilant to keep the fungicides on the fall vines and tomatoes so we picked cucumbers up until frost and kept the blights off the tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, so things remained healthy. We rather out did ourselves, but the warm late fall has certainly helped.

So the leaves are changing and dropping, looks like we will loose our leaves quickly and foliage might be a bit muted this year. We are reminded that even though our work days are comfortable, they are getting dramatically shorter and soon things could get cold. Our ancient potato harvester (digger) has been a bit uncooperative, so there are still  many hundreds of bushels still in the ground, and our carrots, beets and turnips are still out there as well. So we have our hands full, and while the farmstand crew will embark on cleaning and buttoning up the farmstand and gardens, the fall CSA will soon start, and the field crew will marshall on even after our Jamaican friends heads back to the warmth of the Caribbean.  I suspect that part of the reason the time has gone by so quickly this year is that our field crew has been on a dead run all summer and short personnel. We hired five local folks for the field crew over the winter to start in early May. Not one of them showed up for the first day of work and only two individuals out of the five actually called us to tell us. So essentially the field crew operated at 66% capacity for the whole summer. That is like having one out of three employees sick every day of the summer. So lots of things didn’t get done. Other things got done, but not done particularly well. Despite that, there were more positives than negatives. The crew that was here was dependable, amiable and marshaled on with a sense of humor. That is worth everything. All our Jamaican workers are 59 or over, but meshed well with younger local employees. We have much to be pleased about.

Our new barn in which we wash, pack and store produce has worked out very well, although Mike has lamented that we didn’t build it twice the size. The saving in terms of human ergonomics has been more than we could of hoped for, and the facility will also propel us towards compliance with the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).

The pictures below are of the field tomatoes, cover crops and fall cleanup. I guess you have to be a farmer to be interested in the muted greens, blue greens, browns and grays of fall to think of these as pretty pictures. I like to think of it as a refined eye for the subtler colors of fall….who needs red maples when you can feast your eyes on this?

Pooh Talks: whoa moments - favorite tractor driver, George - and August on the farm

Occasionally while racing around the farm I have to pull up and stop and stare at a vista. I refer to this phenomena as a “whoa” moment,  primarily because I get temporarily disorientated as to where I am chronologically in the seasons. This photo of the tomatoes is an example, because I took a picture of them last week  and they were less than a foot high and we hadn’t staked them. “It seemed like only yesterday”, the old saying goes. But of course, it was not. Here we are in August, and we are now harvesting cherry tomatoes and the plums for canning are  ripening up.

taking a hot minute to admire all the loaded tomato plants

The summer goes like that. This one seemingly more so. Alternately dragging on through the drought of the earlier part, we are faced with the struggle of balancing the harvest with the tail end of  a planting season that goes on into early September. Although the sun is back heading south in the sky, the work days are at their longest as we deal with picking fruit and vegetables and trying to find a home for them. This year we are shorthanded as 5 individuals  who approached us for summer and fall employment and we hired decided in the eleventh hour not to show up for the first day. That has put serious demands on the remaining crew and Ray’s ability to manage what takes place in the daily field activities. That said, we have a pretty good crew that seems to be working well and efficiently together, and they seem pretty happy. It would be nice to have the weeds under control and to be doing things in a timely fashion, but I will take a good working atmosphere any day.

Just want to take a minute  to recognize one of our long term employees. This relationship is so long because I first met him as a 5 year old in 1956. He had come to my Dad’s farm to work as a herdsman for the 40-50 cows that we were milking in Hillsboro. His name is George Cilley, he resides and in the house he grew up in in Bradford, NH. George commutes back and forth daily durring the spring and summer and is our go-to guy for tractor and mowing work. He is one of those people for whom a good day of work and having something accomplished defines who he is. Although he is 87, he is patient, sharp, a self starter (if he breaks something, you don’t hear about it unless he can not fix it himself) and can still plow a cleaner, straighter furrow than Ray, myself or Mike. He can also fix old chairs, leaky faucets and happy to run to the Pioneer Valley for  plants or parts if need be. He has as much pride in the good works and efforts as Anne, Sarah, Jenny, Mike or Ray has he does in his own. We had another retiree much like him. Eugene “Pep “ Chabot showed up the day he retired from the Hanover road crew at 66. Put in another 26 years picking vegetables and berries for us, and it was a sad day when he said he had to quit because his eyesight was failing him. Where are these guys? What is the attraction about golf courses and the concept of formal retirement that they resist? Maybe we have just been ultra fortunate to have had the help and wisdom of these highly motivated oldsters.

our most beloved tractor driver, George

 In other news, The new storage and pack barn is so near completion that we are already occupying it. When the crew from Ag Structures showed up on March 1st ,  I had serious doubts that we would be in it by the first of July, especially when winter dragged on for extra innings.  But Jake and Jason made it happen and we are grateful. It has been a large project for us and at times a distraction from the demands of the seasonal work. When we first started on this farm in 1974, it was more about taking down collapsing sheds and buildings. It was strictly chainsaw carpentry:  a couple of guys with some old telephone poles, rough pine and no real carpentry skills When I see how much space we have occupied in the new expanse I am amazed how we were ever able to function in the other smaller barn. All this was driven by food safety mandates and the need to protect fall root crops and store them. But the efficiencies and  improvement in ergonomics has definitely improved everyone's disposition. And even the little people are enjoying it as well …there are small Radio Flyers in there and you can refer to the lower photo of Admiral Hobbs, the U Boat commander, whom seems to be enjoying his new ride. So far, all good….

Hobbes driving ship

most impressive cooler space with our current summer crops

So as we spin towards fall, we are just trying to stay in the groove. Hopefully the weather  (which has been a rollercoaster of late) will not deal us any lethal blows and we can get the fall crops up and out of the field. There is some ancient machinery that needs to function to make that happen, and maybe with the help of a few extra bodies that may yet arrive, perhaps we can slide into Thanksgiving without getting spiked.  I am sure to awaken to a few more “Whoa” moments about the farm when I am caught off guard by the flight of time. At those times I often reminded of the words to a Talking Heads song……” same as it ever was, same as it ever was..”

Pooh Talks: longer days - the wintry arrival of Spring - our new casino (i mean, er vegetable pack house) and how it will change all of our lives, but really and truly it will save all our backs →

Spring is here(sort of), and long gone is the quiet of the dead of winter where the only sound  is the kettle on the wood stove… and someone ticking away on a computer keyboard. Step outside the kitchen door today and there is the ambient droning noise of greenhouse air circulating fans and furnaces firing merrily. Six greenhouses are fired up on line and  there will be four more by St. Patrick’s Day. The core crew is back slogging away in high rubber boots in the mud and snow between greenhouses and barns;  the unwanted remains of an unwanted noreaster that dumped 18 inches of heavy snow on us last week. But the exciting news for us is that the barn building crew from Ag Structures came on site last week and is putting up a barn frame. They are, like us, slogging unceremoniously through the unwanted snow, mud and somewhat winter like weather. But it’s happening, and the reality of it happening is rather exciting . It has drawn a lot of interest.

I posted this picture on Facebook. The regular collection of wise asses and hecklers posted on my timeline: “ What is its’ intended use, Mr. Sprague? Have you created a venue large enough for a stage and dance-floor  for your musical endeavors such that you will not have to drive anywhere at night in your Golden Years?” Someone else speculated that Ray and Mike were moving away from vegetable production by opening a casino and bordello. Perhaps from a financial perspective that’s not a bad idea, and perhaps not a hard sell especially if they included the small music venue for me and my bummy friends..…

But it is really going to be a barn. It’s a pretty big barn: 94 x 50 with 14 foot walls and a pitched roof. It will not go unnoticed. We have described it as a vegetable storage, wash and packaging  barn, designed primarily for handling fresh produce. It is a structure that has been discussed for several years because of its size and cost, but also discussing how it would be laid out to serve solve as many problems and needs that we now have.

Foremost, it replaces our current packing and storage area which we clearly have outgrown. Our wholesale enterprise has grown to be a larger component of our sales. In the height of our production season Ray has now run out of floor space as well as cooler space for produce.  Crops frequently either don’t get harvested or stored in a timely or appropriate way. Space was so tight in the old area that it resembled a vegetable maze. Efficiencies will be gained there, as well as the new barn giving us a truck loading dock so that peoples’ backs will be saved. Repetitive injury is a big concern here. We lift and package produce generally in containers that weigh nominally between 30 and 45 lbs. But we handle a lot of those containers from the end of July to the first of the year, and sometimes each packed container gets lifted, moved, and stacked 3-4 times before it ends up in someone elses’ cooler. I don’t feel the scar tissue I wear  on my back in my lumbar region is a badge of honor that any of my employees needs to earn in their tenure here, so ergonomic efficiencies are important. The new barn will address many of the food safety upgrades that we would be forced to deal with while implementing the FSMA mandates as dictated by the FDA. More washable surfaces, a new wash lines as well as improved post handling refrigeration for the produce. It is an expensive and sizeable pill to swallow, but we should be “good to go” for many years for having swallowed it.

It was 18 degrees last night.  The government had us set our clocks  forward yesterday, so the work days just got longer. The carpenters are here firing up the man-lifts and putting plywood on the sides. It maybe crunchy underfoot, and they maybe forecasting light snow tomorrow, but it sure feels like spring is about to be sprung. And it feels like we are off to the races…..again…

pooh talks end of season wrap up, November depression, Willing Hands & a teensie ounce of holiday cheer

November is a rough month for a lot of people. A lot of grey weather, days getting perilously short, and the ground begins to stiffen up and freeze.  You need  gloves to do just about anything outdoors, and you are not pleased when you have to take them off to do something dexterous with your fingers. It gets  dramatically harder and less pleasant to work outside than it does in October, and a foreboding  hangs in the air that it will get worse before it gets better.

We have been spending a great deal of time trying to get  wholesale  orders out-which are comprised this time of the year of carrots, beets, potatoes, onions and parsnips- washed and packed for sale to the  Coops. The final CSA pick up was last Tuesday. The chickens have left the premises, and  a disconcerting quiet hangs over the farm. The new storage barn has commenced being built but is moving slowly, and there surely will be some unhappy  carpenters working with snowy or icy lumber in the cold depths of January. But for now, winter is slowly closing in.

I found myself  at the Putnam  Farm last week. The day was typically overcast, cold, with a bit of a breeze to give it an edge. The ground was unfrozen at the time, so I was taking  a couple of hours in the middle of the day to take the tractor and cultivators and shape the strawberry rows up prior to applying the winter  covering of mulch.  This task  is a recreational one on a day that is sunny,   but it was overcast and the breeze had an edge to it that made it kind of unpleasant to be sitting still on the tractor, even though I had bundled  myself to look like the Michelin Man, coated in dirt.

At 1:30 in the afternoon a caravan of cars rolled into the carrot field next to where I was working. Fifteen or so retirees  piled out of the cars, smiling and chatting.  The Willing Hands volunteers  had come to glean carrots. The organizers, Milt and Carolyn Frye and Jim McCracken,  moved the trucks and  people  into place and distributed crates for the carrots to be put into. Pretty soon there was a collection of asses and elbows spread out in the field. A few folks worked on their knees, the position I am relegated to these days when I actually participate in harvest.  I could see the friendly banter and smiles  twenty  minutes into the gleaning. Crates of carrots mounted up on the trucks. When I shut the tractor off , they were finishing up. The volunteers were cold,but still smiling and chatting, and  then were picking up a few carrots for themselves to take home. They had  been out in the cold for  well over an hour , and worked pretty hard,  given their ages and  the weather. They really  didn’t have to do this, they could have sat on their butts  this crappy afternoon and filled out puzzles in the Valley News  or stared at social media posts.  Instead, they came for carrots.  These carrots, fortunately,  were beautiful…just too big for commercial sales. So the food shelves  and soup  kitchens would  be the beneficiaries. On this particular day they picked up approximately ¾ of a ton of carrots to be distributed  to folks a little less fortunate  than the rest of us before going back to their lives.  Many of these good folks are retired  and not only glean all season long for Willing Hands but also volunteer doing a variety of other things in the community.

As we all went our separate ways, I realized I was in a better frame of mind than I had been a couple of hours before, the reason being was that I was a participant  with some  good individuals doing a fundamentally good thing. This act of volunteering  was going to provide food to someone.  There is a lot of feel good  smarm written  about the noble farmers feeding humanity. Truth was, I miscalculated, grew a bunch of carrots  that I didn’t have a market  for and  I was  thrilled that  our farm  could partner  with Willing Hands, a non profit who could help harvest and distribute them.

November. For many, that in itself can cause depression.  For the rest of us, we don’t have to look very far in this world to find things that are depressing. Denial of climate change, political leaders behaving like rich privileged brats, meteorological disasters, ramping up of nuclear threats by political leaders, racism, predatory sexual behavior by those who pretend to know better….and the list goes on. But then you have this small  act of generosity in  a small corner of the globe:   Willing Hands doing its’ weekly gleaning at an area farm with volunteers.  November tractor work can still be cold, uncomfortable business.  But for a moment, my heart was warmed by the work of my fellow man.    

Happy Holidays

Pooh talks Strawberries & Kardashians & his trusty Toyota Tacoma

I have seen it written that America buys with its eyes.  I pretty much agree.   And they can buy with complete disregard of functionality.  Pickup trucks have grown to gargantuan proportions, even though they don’t carry anymore payload than my little Toyota truck.  My Tacoma is a small, handy truck  I bought  2004. The Tacoma of 2017 is just about the same size as a Ford  F150 but cant really do as much work as my little version.  And it’s all tricked out with powered this and that, fuzzy carpet (great for collecting dirt) and a million amenities that a normal blue collar tradesman or working stiff will never take the time to use. We have enumerable choices in all facets of our shopping existence.   You can buy  Apple computers and telephones by color.  The GAP and J Crew depend upon us to embrace the latest styles they put forward.  You can get your  kids sneakers with lights in the heels.  And  on and on….

Small fruit and produce are no exception.  People buy pretty.   They talk about nutrient dense wholesome and safe produce.    But the reality here in America  is that most folks want their food cheap, safe and pretty.  “Attractive” still trumps everything else.  Heirloom tomatoes are quite varied in flavor and appearance, yet wholesale accounts tell us that the wide variety of colors and shapes are what generally drive the sales, not the nuanced flavors of the tomatoes themselves. Bell peppers are undergoing a renaissance driven by the same marketing of eye appeal. Plant breeders offer peppers in  green, purple, red, orange and yellow colors in just as many shapes. And then there are hot pepper  choices in  a myriad of shapes and degree of hotness. Yeowtch!

Recently the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine carried an article on Driscolls Berries, the empire that manages to keep strawberries, raspberries and blackberries on your supermarket shelves year around. Driscolls plant breeders are breeding strawberries in pink, white and polka dot configurations. (The polka dot is really the external seed of the strawberry contrasted against a white flesh.)  The powers to be at Driscolls spent a lot of time figuring out how to get product on those supermarket shelves, and they are thinking just as hard about how to keep their  product there, and that means clever marketing and innovative plant breeding.  They already own and drive the market, but they are still not complacent.

The Driscoll berry defines the norm and standard that today’s strawberry is to be judged by. The berries are universally large, have large green calyxes  (the green caps), and a very orange shade of red (disregarding the white tip).  The fruit is very dense and solid and slightly fragrant. The flavor is tangy, with some level of sweetness which is often times more determined by environmental factors than genetic make up.  I will buy them in the dead of winter when the storage apples get mealy, pomegranates go out of season and I have had just about enough bananas and citrus.  As a grower and someone who is always fond of a fresh strawberry,  I have to admit it is a pretty amazing product.  Built into its genetic makeup is an ability to sit on the store shelf for a week without breakdown. But let’s talk about its color, because that is where  it affects us here at the farm.

pictured here, our own berries taken in our own field- fresh picked in the morning light, absolutely amazing flavor, probably wouldn't last more then 5 days in your fridge- but why would you want to wait that long to eat anyway?

Here at Edgewater Farm  our strawberry  season extends about 4 weeks. We plant about 6 different varieties of June bearing strawberries.  (Note: Every strawberry plant has a finite reproductive yield potential. Those that bear that fruit crop in short periods of time are referred to as “June bearing” and those that continually bear fruit over several months are categorized as  “ever bearing “ strawberries. The majority of Driscolls and California berries are ever bearing plants).  We purchase our plant stock from nurseries  that are growing out plant stock dedicated to commercial growers such as ourselves. A great many of those varieties  that we grow were developed by a lone wolf plant geneticist and breeder  named Andrew Jamieson who works for the Canadian Agricultural University  Extension Service out of a  provincial university in Kentville,  Nova Scotia. Over the years we have grown out and used his patented plants because they grow well, look good, fit in the plant mix  and most of all taste good. Jamieson  is “old school”.  He doesn’t short cut with GMO;  he pollinates,  grows out seed stock samples, and rogues these varieties from thousands that he trials every year. Then, he samples  up to 5000 berries a day for a  period of  four weeks determining  which  variety  will  get to “the show”  or go out to the compost pile.   He is a champ of a guy with a good sense of humour as well as being an industry legend among eastern American and Canadian  small fruit growers.  

Strawberries in New England are very different than the California, or even the Floridian berry.  They don’t take the heat well. They tend to be darker color. They are generally not as large throughout the season. The fruit is considerably juicier and softer.  In recent years the darker red  fruit has met with some resistance from produce clerks when wholesaling those strawberries and we hear  comments like “those must be rotting-they are too purpleish-reddish and soft.”  On  occasion we have had them  refused and sent back.  It is because the berry that people see or clerks work with  -the Driscoll  or California  berry- is very large, often white tipped , dense and orangey in color. Because it is on the  shelf  virtually twelve months a year, it defines what a strawberry should look and taste like. All those  cultivars we grew 30 years ago like Catskill, Sparkle, Blomidon and so forth…..would never  get in the front door.

In any new variety trial now we take color very heavily  into consideration in deference to the California berry. We can compete on taste quite handily with Andrew Jasmiesons’ Nova Scotian cultivars, but shelf life, size and color will be tougher.  I understand that “bling” drives American taste in all of life’s facets.  There are magazines for sale - at those same supermarket checkouts where you can buy some pretty nice strawberries in February -who are devoted to detailing for us the latest clothing decisions made  by the Kardashians. I just never thought that shape and appearance  would drive so dramatically the produce industry.

Bling!

bottomline, grow flowers- the pollinators will thank you.

Everyyear there is a public environmental concern “du jour” thatgrasps peoples attention and they seem to fixate on it, albeit for a short while.  A couple of years ago it was invasive plants. People turned out in droves to hand pull garlic buckwheat up and down River Road.  Plant vigilantes showed up at the greenhouses demanding to know if we were sellingpurple loostrife(not since the early 80’s when the people in the conservation districts employed it to naturalize damp wet landscapes). There was even an irate person who demanded I cut down the King Crimson Maple I bought from Baker Nursery in 1978 and planted on my front lawn, on the grounds that it being a Norway Maple,  it was an invasive plant. I assured her that even though it was evening, it would be the first thing I did as soon as I finished my dinner. 

Human attention spans are short. No one hand pulls garlic buckwheat by the bucket full anymore and the person bent on having me cut down the Norway Maple must have realized she was no more effective on my lawn as any of the other hundreds of lawns in Plainfield and Cornish which had Norway Maples in their landscaping.  The environmental concern of 2017 is pollinators.  It has been building for a couple of years as the USDA has been concerned regarding the impact pesticides and environmental stress that have been placed on the honey bee populations as well as the nativebee populations. There are some movie documentaries that are devoted to problems of the pollinators and their disappearance.  There is some real room for concern, but for some of us it is not a new concern.  Beingin the retail arena, we get a lot of public push and concern regarding environmental issues. I have kept honeybees in the past, and currently work with a local beekeeper, and need pollinators in my business.  I am not insensitive to the problem by any means. We need to support those pollinator populations for our needs, but we also need to employ insecticides to deal with pest populations that can arise. So it is a balancing act that takes some thought, and some compromise.   Additionally, we try to understand, support and sometimes plant habitat for pollinators.  Honeybees actually do very little of the pollinating on our farm. We purchase a small amount ofEuropean bumble bee colonies to pollinate in our enclosed tomato greenhouses early in the year, and the native bumblebee populations take care of the blueberries.   Honeybees are most useful in vine crops like pumpkins, winter-squash, melons and cukes and what little tree fruit thatwe have.  They like raspberries as well, and will be seen in profusion on the blossoms. Solitary ground-bees and small wasps do most of the work in the strawberries.  There are little insects that crawl about the blossoms and inadvertently pollinate the flowers.  So there are a host of insects other than honey bees, thankfully, that are willing to work towards our pollination needs. When we choose an insecticide for a pest outbreak, we have to think of the impact it mayhave on the pollinators, or as I like to say-the “good guys”.  It really does temper our decisions.  For example, neonicitinoids have been in the news a lot, and getting bad press. Essentially, it is a systemic nicotine compound that the plants uptake so that when the insects eat the plant they get poisoned.  (Nicotine…as in cigarettes. There is a lesson there, dear children…).  We use neonicotinoids on the seed pieces of the potatoes when we plant them. The compound protects the emerging plant for about 6 weeks from the predation by the Colorado potato beetle, the single biggest problem in growing potatoes. It replaces 2-3 sprays of Sevin which is that default cure for their predation. The active ingredient in Sevin is carbamate, an active ingredient that is highly persistent and toxic to bee colonies. 

Neonics are systemic insecticides that are absorbed into the plant, a very direct way of targeting pests as opposed to general spray applicationsadministered to the plants through boom sprayers or mist blowers, which oftentimes reduce pest predators and bugs "innocently standing by. How long neonics remain active and effective and break down are dependent on many factors. Some of the many factors are pesticide formulation, time of application, and plant metabolic rates. So, in some corn scenarios, the neonic pesticide formulation can still be active at the time corn tassels and bees that are gathering pollen may be affected if they gather corn pollen, even though seed treatment was the only way it was introduced. It is my understanding that the material we use on potato seed pieces has a half life of 6 weeks, which will break down before the potatoes bloom. Again, controlling the colorado potato beetles without neonics would return us to the time when we used multiple overhead foliar applications of materials that are as toxic and far more detrimental to the pollinators and innocent good guy" bugs.

 So, as I told a woman who inquired, it is the choice I made because it is the lesser of two evils. Pretty hard to hand pick Colorado potato beetles off from 5 acres of potatoes. 

You may be one of the individuals who are caught up in the pollinator collapse concern of 2017. It’s a good thing to know about and understand.  There are additional avenues of action to channel your concern other than spending several hundreds of dollars to set up a small backyard apiary or demand neonicitinoids be removed from the marketplace.  The biggest thing you can do is plant more flowering shrubs and flowers. The nectar and pollen that the native (and non native) plants provide is key in establishing healthy pollinator populations. Broaden your definition of pollinators from honey bees and bumblebees. There are hundreds of different types of flying and crawling insects that do this work, so spend a little time looking to see who the “good guys” actually are in your garden. 

Besides, you don’t need all that lawn to mow anyway. Put some more garden in. 

Marigolds and Alyssum: not just another pretty face.

That’s a catchy and cute picture. The question is this: What is the bigger picture?  Well, one could view the photo as an interplanting of annuals in a tomato greenhouse. And that would be correct. But is there a purpose, other than the obvious ornamental aesthetic that marigolds and sweet allysum bring to any planting? Those of you who follow Edgewater Farm on the web or whom have shopped at our greenhouses and asked the pesticide questions of us will know that our insect control in our greenhouses is primarily achieved by the utilization of predatory or parasitic insects. Thus a true distinction between good bugs and bad bugs actually exists. This means we purchase and release bugs that will actually parasitize or eat the bad bugs. They are the good guys. Who are the bad bugs? There are many, but traditionally in new England greenhouses the Axis of Evil is comprised of 4 main bug species, and they are aphids, thrips, whiteflies and spider mites. If you are looking for a lesson in entomology and the taxonomy of insects you should start looking elsewhere other than my blog. Take my word for it. When the spring sun gets longer, the days warm up, the reproductive juices in these critters starts to flow. And one thing that insects can do is reproduce. In large numbers. Very quickly. And what fuels this lusty metabolic frenzy?The flowers and vegetables we had hoped to sell.  Twenty five years ago- due in large part to research that was being done in Ontario and Vermont- we committed to trying to solve our insect pest problems in the greenhouse by introducing “beneficials”, a name for insects that attack pest populations through predation or parisitation. Everybody knows that ladybug and ladybird beetles view aphids as the “Quarter Pounder with Cheese” of the Insect Kingdom. Beetles are fast and efficient predators, and can decimate aphid populations that are able to reproduce at logarithmic rates in the spring. There is a beetle that decimates and cleans up white fly larvae. There are a host of tiny wasps that are predators of aphids and whiteflys as well. There are speedy little plant bugs that race around chewing up thrips in the flower sand leaves that are the above ground, and miniscule little soil born nematodes that devour thrips larvae growing in the soil.

So the main concept is to have enough good bugs in the greenhouse to balance out and reduce the population of bad guys in the greenhouse. After 25 years and a slow expensive slog of trial and error and research, we are 80% there. Sometimes we get caught. Things don’t go according to Nature’s or my plans, and we have to spray something when it all gets out of control in favor of the bad guys. Bio- control is expensive, and you have got to anticipate and lead an insect escalation in pest population like you have to lead the pitcher’s fastball. You have to make sure there are enough beneficials established before the problem is actually apparent. You watch for it, you get your bat off your shoulder and start your swing a little earlier. We locate “hot spots” of pests, and try to get a sufficient population of beneficials on board before it actually becomes a problem. Additionally, and making the process more problematic is they don’t carry bottles of ladybugs or encarsia formosa up at CVS or Walmart. People have to grow the good insects in captivity, sell them through a dealer network and get them to you in good shape, which means a good deal more than just “alive”. It takes a week lead time to order and have beneficials arrive on-farm. A weeks time. A lot of bad guy insect reproduction can happen in a week.

So, what is the deal with the marigolds and alyssum and how does it pertain to any of this? Insects are like humans in that they need a balanced diet. A beetle can survive a long time on aphids alone, just like I could live a while on quarter pounders with cheese. (I bet you didn’t think I would reuse that analogy, did you?) But something is missing out of both our diets. So improve my diet, I probably need some fruit or a salad. Or two. The parasitic insects like pollen and nectar. Nectar, its not just for honeybees anymore…. In the case of our alyssum, it feeds the good guy tiny parasitic wasps that are present in the tomato greenhouse, as well as the small bumble bee hive that I will purchase to pollinate my tomatoes. The pollen is enjoyed by good and bad alike, but by creating a habitat that fosters the good insects, we hopefully will offset any help we inadvertently have provided to the culprits as well. In short, insect control is achieved by moderating the environment. It is trickier and more expensive than buying a bottle of pesticide and spraying, but it is safer, and maybe more effective in the long run.

Furthermore, it provides an alternate strategy that makes it safer for me and suits the way I choose to farm.  Out in the field, it works similarly, but because there is not enough research being done locally and the outdoor environment is much more difficult than the semi-closed environment of a greenhouse, there are a lot of gaps in the supply, production and knowledge regarding use of beneficial insects outdoors. I still have to resort to chemicals frequently when treating outdoor pests, but I foresee a time when the next generation here at the farm will be releasing beneficials on a large scale for pest problems in the field. In the next blog I will talk a bit more about pest control in the field and the industrywide changes that we are beginning to experience.  Marigolds and alyssum. Not just another pretty face.