We will have the following veggies this week:
lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, broccoli, beets, carrots, cucumber, zucchini, eggplant, onions, beans, peppers, dill, cilantro, parsley, and basil.
This week I skewered eggplant, zucchini, pepper and onion on the barbeque and had it with basil buttered beans and it was delicous!
On the farm this week:
It’s August now and we’re on the home stretch for planting for the year. Here we worked in the peas which will now be reincarnated into our final plantings of lettuce and spinach.
Right now the cabbage moths are getting bad so we’re back to covering things up – looks like the holidays over!
I’ve been watching all the bugs and animals this year, and so far we haven’t really had any big problems. We had a mystery animal that would chew a path through multiple rows of the pea trellis every day – so we then re-trellised it every day (talk about annoying!). I thought it was a rabbit I saw a couple times, Michael said he saw a baby moose in the peas one day and Sarah swears she saw bigfoot early one morning. Maybe it will come back next year and we can catch it and find out.
Recently though I’ve been most intrigued by the aphids on the dandelion roots and frenzy of ants running around that occurs when I pull up a dandelion. (There are 2 visible aphids on the dandelion roots below). Apparently the ants ‘farm’ the aphids- they bite the aphids wings off so they can’t fly away and then herd them onto plants where they feed of their delicious aphid secretions. It sounds a bit disgusting to me, but I guess I got to respect my fellow farmers. It has me wondering though whether it is a good idea to achieve my life’s goal of pulling every dandelion. On which plants would the ants farm the aphids if there weren’t dandelions??
That’s it for this week.
See you soon,
Jonathan, Nicole, Sarah and Michael