Farm Update

This is the time of year when we really start to keep an eye on the weather.

The strawberries are going to be hit and miss from now on. The heat did a number on them last week, but they are rebounding surprisingly strongly. With possible rain in the forecast we may lose some of this ripening fruit. Substantial rain makes the berries mold on the plant, but if the storms don’t amount to much we may be able to harvest quite a few more strawberries before the season is done.

In spite of the potential negative impact on the strawberries, we are hoping for a good soaking so that we can plant our winter cover crops into moisture. The sandy soil at our Lewis Road ranch offers very little resistance to the double-disk openers on our grain drill when it is dry, meaning that it is hard not to bury the cover crop seeds too deeply. We also get much better weed control in the cover crops by waiting until an early rainstorm brings up a good “flush” of weeds which we then kill off with a shallow pass using a disc-harrow prior to planting. If our timing is right, there will still be enough moisture in the soil for the large-seeded cover crop seeds to germinate, while most of the small seeded weeds do not. And lastly there is the most obvious reason to pray for rain—avoiding the time-consuming expense of having to irrigate winter cover crops during a time of drought. We could really use a good rainy winter so that we get robust cover crops. We depend on the cover crops to add significant organic matter and nutrients to the soil, and last year’s cover crops were stunted by the drought conditions.

We have a new challenge on our farm this month. Last week Steve found the dreaded Bagrada bug in our fields. This invasive stink bug already decimated one field of young kale, and is at both our home and Lewis Road sites. The Bagrada bug is being called the “pest that is threatening organic agriculture” and, in our first encounters with it, it seems to be living up to its reputation. None of the usual predators eat Bagrada bugs and they are voracious, multiply quickly, and feed on a wide variety of crops. Bagrada bugs have been spreading north from Arizona and Southern California for the past several years–they only arrived in Santa Cruz County within the past two months. We are looking into ways to control the population of this pest, including covering crops with row cover, planting trap crops to lure the bugs away, and vacuuming bugs off of plants. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Pictures from UC Cooperative Extension showing distribution of Bagrada Bug in November 2010 and September 2014.