Week 5 on the Farm 2016: Fruit and Foraging

Weather Forecast: Highs in the high 50s, partly cloudy.

Well, spring is definitely in full swing here on the farm! With the little bit of moisture we got last Thursday plus the warm temperatures over the weekend, the peach, plum, and cherry trees have all bloomed out. In a couple of days the apples will as well. With bloom comes another layer of tasks in the orchard: insect pest and disease prevention. As you should know by now, our primary strategy in dealing with pests and diseases is to support the health of our plants so that they are less susceptible to illness and predation. One thing we'll do over the next several weeks is to feed the fruit trees with foliar sprays which include things like liquid kelp and fish emulsion to make sure they've got adequate nutrition at this critical time of growth, pollination, and fruit set. We'll also be taking measures to make the lives of insect pests just a little more difficult. About a week ago I set two sticky traps in the orchard baited with pheromone lures that mimic the pheromones that female Oriental Fruit Moths (OFMs) send out to attract males for mating. Today I found several OFMs stuck in the traps, so tomorrow morning I'll begin putting OFM pheromone dispensers in all of the trees. These dispensers will flood the orchard with female OFM pheromone, making it a lot harder for the male OFMs to find the female moths. Less mating = less egg laying = fewer worms in my apples. Pretty clever, huh?

You don't need to read this entire article, but the first graphic ("Mating Disruption") is a nice visual aid to help you understand how this process works: http://jenny.tfrec.wsu.edu/opm/displaySpecies.php?pn=-80

Speaking of fruit, one of the things we're going to have you help us with this week is weeding and thinning our strawberry patch. Though Michigan has a reputation for growing tasty strawberries, 80% of this country's strawberries are grown in California. Here's an article on some of the problems created by conventionally grown berries: 
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/05/17/152522900/the-secret-life-of-californias-world-class-strawberries. Note the sidebar: "Why Are Strawberries Getting Bigger and Blander?"

And this article talks about the effects of conventional strawberry production on the farm workers who plant, cultivate, and harvest the berries: http://civileats.com/2015/03/26/is-the-strawberry-field-the-next-farmworkers-rights-battleground/. It ends with a statement by Dana Geffner, executive director of Fair World Project: "Consumers do not value fresh berries more than the lives of those who pick them." Do you think this is true? I'm not sure . . . .

What's the solution? Well, one solution might be growing your own. We'll teach you how to plant and care for a strawberry patch while you help us weed ours. 

For those of you who are interested, we'll take a detour from the gardens and head into the woods to do some foraging. And we'll talk about the role of foraging in the local foods movement. This article gives a good example of what can happen when a marketplace mentality is applied to wild foods: http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-urban-foraging-wild-onions-met-20150510-story.html. We'll see if we can't do better with our own foraging practices!