A lamentation

Yesterday I had a sense of humor about garden pests. I wrote a haiku or two, had a little fun with it. Today I am despondent. Because today, there is a new pest. And this pest trumps all the other pests we've had so far.
First we had the cabbage moth. Well, we still have her, really. A white moth that comes around looking kinda pretty and lays one little yellow egg on the underside of the leaves of all cabbage family crops. Then a tiny little green caterpillar appears, and starts munching. These are a nuisance, but relatively easy to control when you're working with a space as small as ours, so we hand pick all the little eggs, and smoosh all the little caterpillars. Plus, the cat plays around with the butterflies, even manages to kill one once in a while. So cabbage and collards are under control.
We've been through the spinach leaf miner (see previous entry). These are a bigger deal, since they lay way more eggs and their damage happens more quickly and is much worse. They are a bit more complex, too, since they overwinter and pupate in the dirt, but they lay their eggs like the cabbage moth, so we come around and rub those off just like the others, and pretty soon the problem seems under control.
Which brings us to the cabbage root fly. This fly looks like a house fly, but that's neither here nor there since we definitely won't be out swatting flies all morning long, so who cares if we can't tell them apart? It, too overwinters in the soil. It pupates in the soil too, but not before its larvae have eaten a tunnel through the roots of the cabbage plant (insert here collard greens, kale, turnips-you get the picture) and left it for dead. So, you don't see this pest until you've uprooted your cabbage plant to look for it, only to find that your cabbage plant's roots have been replaced with five or six gross white maggots that writhe and wriggle. Ew. Sick.
So because of this pest, we are losing our crop of cabbage and collard greens, and if we don't do something about it (read pull all these plants out of the ground and burn them or feed them to the chickens), we might well lose our turnips, kale and radishes, and all of next year's cabbage crops too.
So today I have lost my good humor, and my hope for these, my favorite crops.

Owed to the leaf miner

Your white eggs were seen
Neatly laid and tucked away,
and promptly destroyed.

Ode to the leaf miner

Lush green leaves turn brown.
Spinach is a bug's delight,
Bugs, a farmer's woe.

Put your watering cans away, we made the Big Time.

For the last year and a half- and actually for as long as I can remember in any garden I've worked- our "irrigation" has consisted of a hose (or series of hoses totaling 300 feet) and a bunch of buckets and cans. Not anymore! We bought a brand new drip irrigation system from the good people at Nolt's produce supply, and installed it yesterday. Normally I am averse to working with any kind of hosing and leave it all to Matt to take care of (a tangled hose or wire could send my temper through the roof in seconds and leave me in poor spirits for the rest of the day), but I thought I'd give this a whirl with him in case one day I find myself alone and needing to know how the system all works. It was much simpler than I'd anticipated- pleasant, even. We laid out the long header along the top of the beds, about 85 feet or so of hose. Then Matt punched holes in it about every 12 inches, and I followed him with the little plastic valves, plugging them into the pre-punched holes. Next, Matt took the giant roll of tape and rolled it back and forth lengthwise down the garden- about 150 feet each- cutting and tying each end while I attached my end to the valve. This whole production took about 2 hours. We turned it on and lo and behold, water dripped slowly from the holes, just as it should. Nothing to it, really. Now we have to wait a few more weeks to put mulch over it, which will keep it from looking unsightly (see long, black lines running the length of the entire garden), and will keep the plastic from heating up and the water from evaporating.
Now we can turn the water on and go about our business, safe in the knowledge that the plants will get the water they need, and none will be wasted.

What Would Saint Patrick Do?

I was supposed to attend a very important workshop on Wednesday that would teach me how to price my produce for market. I was excited about it for weeks, because I've never felt very professional when it came to pricing my produce, and this might give me the confidence I needed. We're supposed to do a market at Greensgrow in Kensington this season, along with a few household shares on the side, and I've yet to work out all the fine details of either of those operations. I also recently called up a chef I used to work for to see if he might want to buy some micro greens that we aren't even really sure if we're growing yet. Needless to say, I need to attend a workshop about pricing produce for market. But when I came home from work on that gorgeous, sunny Wednesday afternoon, all of my housemates were out back drinking beers and eating Pringles and playing beer pong by the fire.
Now, I'd never played beer pong before...