This has been a busy week, so busy I barely know where to start. Every year the week of the Fourth of July is busy but then I always forget until the following year because the busyness of the season just starts to blend together.
Here we two interesting things that happened this week: We harvested over five hundred pounds of cabbage and I discovered that large frogs are eating thousands if not millions of bugs, mostly pests, in my fields.
I wasn’t necessarily planning on harvesting so much cabbage this week but…after Tuesday morning harvest I was having lunch, enjoying the field and noticed these beautiful white moths fluttering around. My first thought was how pastoral and ideallic the whole scene was. Then it donned on me that the moths are cabbage moths and if I didn’t harvest my cabbages they would be filled with holes.
Then on Friday I was weeding the buttercup squash (for our famous buttercup squash soup) and noticed evidence of some small creature in the field. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, maybe it was something left over from a weasel or some other small animal. But then I recognized the shell of a potato beetle in the mix. I got very excited because it meant that something was eating potato beetle, one of our most persistent and devastating pests. I showed it to Half Pint farm and they said it was the refuse from a frog. This reminded me of my Golden Friend, from an earlier blog post, and it energized to finish weeding the next 1000 row feet of winter squash.
