Amazing. Farmer Bill will pick the last of his strawberries on Monday - and that's it for this year. The crop suffered from frost damage & angular leaf spot. The frost was one that was missed - possibly when we were in Scotland for our daughter's wedding, or possibly shortly after we came back, or maybe even earlier. We really don't know... which indicates it might be time to think about a different frost alert system. Food for thought for next winter. Angular leaf spot was a problem across our area, wherever people used sprinkler irrigation to do frost protection. The bacterium lives in the soil and spreads to the strawberry leaves via splashing water. It is hard to control, but there is a spray that seems to get good results - and is labelled for organic use, which is an added bonus.
[If you haven't read my previous diatribes on whether organic producers spray, they do. None of us wants to poison the earth, the people eating our produce, or ourselves. But farmers who are in farming to make a living need to have a crop to sell, and sometimes (often) nature throws us a curve ball that we have to figure out how to hit. An organically-approved pesticide means that the chemicals in it have been proven to break down rapidly, leaving little or no residue on the produce.]
We started picking the summer raspberries this week and the response has been good - because the crop looks pretty good.
We're seeing splashes of red in the grape tomato hoop house, the melons are blossoming like crazy (get busy, you bees!), and the slicing tomatoes look good to me, but I haven't seen any red yet. There's a LOT of sweet corn planted - on our place and at a neighbor's place - but Farmer Bill says he's not planting off the farm after this year. It's too hard to keep up with the additional acreage during strawberry season. I've been encouraging him (okay, maybe I've been nagging a little bit) not to expand every year. We're not getting any younger, and the 16-hour days seem harder every summer. In the middle of strawberry season he usually agrees that he should cut back, but in the middle of the winter when he's rested again, almost anything seems possible.
It looks like the Zestar! might actually be our most plentiful apple variety for this year. After the April 10 frost, where all the existing blossoms were frozen, the Zestar! put out a few new clusters here and there. Most trees actually have a few apples on them!
It's still a long slog through the summer. I'm hoping that the tomatoes, melons, and sweet corn continue to do well. And that Farmer Bill can find a couple of good marketing staff to help him get them sold.
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