I decided I wasn’t going to post this week until the sun came out again! Well, today it has, although in all honesty, it’s actually that weak, cloud-filtered sunlight that wouldn’t really count unless you haven’t seen much else for the rest of the month. Heck- at this point I even get excited about a little bit of blue peeping through the clouds! Last Friday, on a truly gorgeous, sunny day, I was finally able to get all of the summer crops into the ground. Usually, I plant the tomatoes, eggplant, squash, etc. around May 7, close to our average last frost date of the year. Although it hasn’t come close to frosting since earlier in April, the temperatures have been so mediocre for most of May that I decided to hold off on planting these heat-loving crops until it warmed up a bit more. When it comes to farming and gardening, the weather really is the ultimate boss no matter how much planning you do!
I’m almost scared to jinx it, but as of now, this week is finally supposed to start looking more like early summer. According to the forecast, we should have highs in the 80s and even thunderstorms by the middle of the week. And, just in time, the garden is really starting to fill up, with the spring mix nearly ready for its first harvest, the beans finally popping above the ground, and the beds filled with tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, sweet potatoes, squash, and cucumbers seedlings.
On a less positive note, that wonderful Piracicaba broccoli I mentioned before is not doing so well. When we first began digging up the yard for the garden, I noticed a lot of cut worms in various stages of their life cycle. This was not a good find. These destructive little pests are nocturnal, so hard to control by hand-picking as I often do with other pests, and they will eat almost anything, especially leafy greens. Because cut worms live in the ground, even row cover isn’t an effective deterrent if you already have them in your soil. From the start, they have been going after the broccoli and chomping its leaves and stems to bits. I have sprayed Bacillus thuringiensis, an organic-approved microbe that sticks to the leaves and damages the gut of these soft-bodied insects when they eat the plant, but with the continual rain we’ve had, I’m pretty sure that it’s quickly been washed off. I also built little protective circles with the cardboard tubes from paper towel rolls, something I had read about in the past as a good technique. We must have really smart cutworms, though, because this doesn’t seem to have fazed them much! I’m going to leave the plants in there as long as they are still alive and we’ll see if they make it. And, otherwise, I’ll just be keeping my fingers crossed for some actual sun!
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