Flea beetles, how do i hate thee

If you don’t know what flea beetles are,  you probably haven’t tried growing arugula,  eggplant,  pac choi,  mizuna, turnips, radishes or any of the other plants these little monsters love.

They are tiny,  usually metallic colored beetles. They can fly,  but usually spring off the plant,  flea like,  when you get too close.

The tell tale sign of flea beetles is the myriad number of small perfect holes that they eat through leaves.  They have ruined most of our arugula plantings this year and we’ve just been able to keep ahead of them on the pac choi. They have also wrecked havoc on the radish and turnip leaves,  but that doesn’t effect the marketability of those crops.

It’s difficult to deal with them in an organic fashion,  next year we will be more proactive by using row covers to protect the crops from the invasion. In the mean time we are trying some organic insecticides,  but they aren’t a booming success.

I’ve heard people saying that they are particularly bad this year and that is some comfort, at least it’s better than having to admit I was unprepared and bested by a miniscule brained enemy.

Quick Farm update week of 6/20

So, the tomatoes are all trellised

Last year we grew fifty tomato plants.  It was more than we needed personally and we planted them a little too close together so we had a serious blight issue. This year we decided to plant them further apart and to not plant so many. So this year we only have a hundred and twenty plants. But we did plant them further apart.

In the past I’ve always tried to grow tomatoes in cages. Basically you buy some wire fencing, cut it into 6 foot lengths, make a long tube out of it by tying the two ends together. You put that around the small plant, put a stake next to it and tie the cage to the stake so it doesn’t fall over. I never have enough cages so a lot of the plants get tied directly to stakes. This year I needed a new plan.

There are two basic types of tomato plants, determinate and indeterminate. Determinate types grow about three or four feet, set some fruit,  then they are sort of done.  Indeterminates, left unpruned, will become a huge, bushy,  unwieldy mess. But they will grow until frost kills them and can grow quite tall.

I knew I needed to prune our tomato plants. I’ve never done it before but after watching a few videos on YouTube I felt I could handle it (it’s very simple). Then I needed a figure out what support system to use for the plants.

Originally I fell in love with the way commercial growers support them in greenhouses. They tie a string to an overhead support and wrap the other end of the string around the tomato plant as it grows. But I just didn’t have the time to build an overhead structure for my tomato plants growing outside. So I decided to utilize the Florida basket weave.

Basically, you pound a stake into the ground every three or four plants, tie the string to the first stake and weave the string around  the plants. When you get to the next stake, you wrap the string around it a few times and continue on. When you get to the end of the row you go back weaving the plant on the opposite side so they have strings on both sides. You repeat this as needed during the season as the plants grow.

The tomato plants were already tall and needed to be supported long before I got to them.  Like I’ve mentioned before,  we farm on two different plots, so one night after work,  I went to the plot closest to the house and pruned all the indeterminate tomatoes (about 30), then I caged and staked them. Because they were so large already,  the pruning took off a lot of plant matter.  I was a little concerned,  but I was pretty sure that I’d followed the directions correctly.

So the next night I was planning to prune the tomatoes in the other plot.  But all day I was curious as to how the pruned plants were doing,  I decided to stop by and check them on my way to prune the second batch.  But when I got home,  I had a few things to do so when I left the house,  I forgot to check the first plot.

I remembered just before I got to the plot,  I rationalized that there were only two rows of tomatoes here and this wouldn’t take too long. I’d just weave them now and prune them after I was sure I’d done it right.

These days, my workday is pretty long and I get a little punchy at times.  For example yesterday during lunch break I realized I had been staring blankly at a license plate for about 5 minutes and when I retrieved myself from the brain fog,  I wasnt sure if I had eaten my lunch or not.

So when I got to the pruning site,  I had somehow forgotten that there were three rows of tomatoes and that they were huge.  They had to be pruned. I figured it would take an hour or two so I got to work.

3 1/2 hours later I pruned and weaved the last tomato. I was pretty wiped out and my hands were so dark green they were black from pruning the branches with my thumbnail. I stood there for a minute admiring the evening’s work when a worry seeped into my weary brain; I have no idea if I just pruned all these correctly or not, I may have just wiped out the bulk of our tomatoes.

I packed up my tools and decided I needed to head to our other plot and check on the tomatoes I had pruned the night before. If I didn’t, I knew I would worry and have a hard time falling asleep.

It was getting dark when I walked through the gate. I spent about 20 minutes examining the tomato plants looking for any sign of permanent damage. But they looked good. I relaxed and realized the Tomatoes would survive.

I drove home to take a shower, wondering how difficult it is to clean chlorophyll off of your hands.

1 down, 21 to go. Our first Farm Market

 

This is our first year farming. We work about half an acre in total, and knew it was going to be a lot of work but I’m not sure we were prepared for our current adventure. There is a lot more involved than I ever realized, and I don’t think that many people know what goes into producing food on a small farm.

One of our first decisions was where to sell our produce. Based on many different factors, one of which was that both of us would be working regular jobs besides working on the farm, Read more “1 down, 21 to go. Our first Farm Market” →