Vegetable Overview

The main vegetable field has many crops at the moment — kale, several varieties of head and non-head lettuce, beets, collards, fennel, herbs, and several others. The black strips going down each row is irrigation tubing that has small slits every few inches.  Each tube connects to a main spine going down the center of the field which is pressurized by a pump drawing from a creek not far from the field.

Here is a row of beets.

This is a Harlequin bug.  It’s related to stinkbugs and is a plant sucker.  It’s a major pest this year — we’ve all spent many hours picking these guys off the plants.  It seems like they’ll damage any Brassica-like crop.  We’ve tried a couple of (organic) sprays to control them, but it doesn’t seem to help.  Manual removal is the only reliable method.

This is a cat that stays fulltime around this field.  Her name is Dragon Kitty.  We bring another cat (Lil’ T) with us every day when we go to work in the field, and he and Dragon Kitty spend the day playing with each other and chasing grasshoppers.

Opposite the field are several covered houses.  Bell and hot peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, and other such taller plants are grown in these.  Just to the left of the first house is a row of okra.

This house has two rows of peppers and a row of (now dying) cucumbers.

Eggplant and spicy peppers.

Slicer and cherry tomatoes.

Not everything grown on a farm is for eating!  The flowers are supposed to attract pollinators to the area to increase the yield on the main crops.  I don’t know how effective it is, but it’s nice to have the flowers around.