Bug night

It's Wednesday -- bug night at Straight River Farm.

Here at SRF, we prefer to use as few pesticides as possible.  In order to decide when to use a fungicide or insecticide on our apples, we use pheromone traps to attract the most worrisome pests and a data logger that logs degree days and leaf wetness.  Once a week, on Wednesday nights, I go through the orchard and pull out the trap liners -- covered with sticky stuff to trap the bugs -- and collect the data logger from its hook.  I download the data into our computer and print it out in table format.  The traps get new liners and the data logger gets re-activated and goes back out in the orchard.  Simple & effective.

The whole process is made a lot easier thanks to the MN Department of Agriculture.  They have an ongoing study of apple horticulture going on.  The data I collect gets emailed in and the MDA puts out a newsletter every week during the apple growing season.  Our data, along with data from orchards across the state, is published to help apple growers make decisions.  They provide us with the trap liners each year and gave us the data logger 6 or 7 years ago.  Knowing that they are waiting for the data and that we're helping others by providing it, helps me remember to do the counts each week.  If we didn't have that responsibility I'm afraid there would be plenty of times when we'd blow it off, or manage to 'forget' to collect the bugs.

Because of the data we collect, we haven't had any apple scab (a nasty fungus that is a huge problem in Minnesota) in the orchard for years, usually with only 1 or 2 sprays.  In an orchard with active scab problems a grower might spray 4-6 or more times.  In a strictly organic orchard, one needs to spray for scab every 10 days starting when the apples blossom, and in between those 10 day periods if there's a significant rain event (about twice a week this year).  We have minimal insect damage to our apples, too, because we're able to time the insecticide sprays to the developmental stage of the problem bugs without killing off all of the beneficial bugs.

So tonight is bug night.  But I have a new work schedule at the library and I'm off every other Thursday, so tonight I'm ignoring the bugs and will go collect them in the morning since the data doesn't have to be in until 10:00 on Thursday morning).  It's not totally laziness... it rained 2 inches yesterday and today and everything is just plain wet out there.  I'm waiting overnight to let things dry up a little bit...  And, since Farmer Bill took the night off to go to the Twins game, I'm also planning to slip down to my quilting table and work on a project for a little while tonight.  If he can take the night off, so can I, right?