Bugs

August is bug season on the farm. We see bugs everywhere, we feel them biting and nibbling on us while we work and we hear the cicadas constantly. When you spend as many hours outdoors as we do you get used to bugs everywhere. We are happy to see many of our bugs because they help keep our pest bug population in check. Some bugs though we are happy to see simply because of their beauty. Such is the case with these butterflies that love the flower field!


On the other hand when we find tomatoes that look like this we know that tomato hornworms have arrived.


These guys demolish tomato plants. Fortunately a parasitic wasp also likes the hornworms. In fact it uses the hornworm to feed its larvae. Here is a tomato hornworm with parasitic wasp larvae on its back.


It may seem gross but I'd much rather see this than to have to spend my time spraying our organic control for the tomato hornworms.

As far as our crops are concerned we've got lots of beans coming into production. We've got fresh green beans in addition to these edible soybeans (also known as edamame). They have a very loyal following among some of our customers, but we had to scale back our planting a bit this year because we ended up with more edamame than we knew what to do with last year!


Of course everyone knows how to enjoy these wonderful French fillet beans. Young and tender they only need to be cooked for a couple of minutes. We are at the end of our first planting of these beans, but we have another planting that will mature later in September.


Finally come the middle of August we've got whole fields that need to be cleaned up. This is where we have grown many of our crops over the past couple of months. They have all been mowed and tomorrow this field should be tilled and prepared for its fall cover crop of oats and tillage radish.