It was too good to be true. The Bagrada Bugs are here at last. The home farm is still free of them, but they moved into the Lewis Road ranch en masse last week. Fortunately some of our young tender greens are already covered with row cover, which works to some extent if you get it on before the bugs arrive. We may need to invest in a better system for using the row cover if we need to cover larger areas with it. At least this pattern seems to indicate that the bugs are not overwintering here, so we have a substantial part of the growing season when we don’t have to deal with them.
The good news this week is that we have completed the permit process for drilling the new well, which is scheduled to begin in October. Meanwhile the neighbor’s well that we had tapped into will be turned back on this week (it’s been offline for a month and a half due to problems similar to what we’re experiencing with our own old well). We should now have enough water to get our mature (and a bit leggy) greenhouse starts out into the ground for the late fall and winter harvest.
We had a wonderful time and there was an excellent turnout at the Live Oak Grange on Saturday for the Wild Farms Wild Fish dinner. The black cod was simply amazing along with the other creative delicious dishes served at the event, coordinated by longtime CSA member Tereza Corragio. We watched the film “Souixtable Food” about redefining the notion of Native American food. Speakers educated us about the Slow Fish branch of the Slow Food movement, and what it means to buy sustainable fish. Jo Ann Baumgartner talked about farming with the wild and also had gardening tips for the audience, and Steve and I presented some pictures and our own experiences farming with hedgerows and wild areas. Kudos to Tereza and the other organizers and volunteers from the Live Oak Grange, Slow Food, Slow Fish, and Wild Farm Alliance. It was the most well organized, delicious, interesting, successful event I’ve been to in a long time.
Proceeds from the dinner are being contributed to our crate campaign, which has raised about $8,000 so far! The company that we’re getting the crates from have allowed us to purchase 500 crates now at the 1500 crate discount level as long as we order more in a few months. When those first crates come in, we’ll incorporate them into one of our CSA routes at first as a trial run. Thanks to all of you who have contributed and your great comments—waste reduction is clearly an important issue for our community. And thanks to CSA Administrator Sarah Brewer for doing the leg work to make sure this happened this year. Crates are on their way!
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