Week 10 - July 5th and 7th

This week on Tuesday, we were in the Terrace garden to harvest vegetables for the Kwantlen Street Farmers' Market later that day. We are beginning to harvest the summer crops of eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini, and a little bit of tomatoes.

 

Some of our sunflowers are amazing tall.

 

 

We reseeded more radishes about a month ago and they are ready to be harvested, but they have been attacked by cabbage maggots.

 

 

We let the weed Purslane grow with the green onions because it creates a good ground cover to help hold in moisture and reduce other weeds. It also helps to hide the onions from onion maggot flies that lay their eggs at the base of the onion plant. Even though it is considered a weed, it tastes good and can be added to salads. Even better, it is a good source of Omega-3 fatty acids.

 

 

 

 

Only four of the sweet potato leaves that Mike got to sprout roots have survive so he is going to try and get some more.

 



 

We are a little worried about the tomatoes because of all the rain we have had that they might get Late Blight, but so far so good.

 

 



Some of the squash plants was showing signs of Powdery Mildew so they were sprayed the week before with Serenade Max which is an organic approved fungicide to help control it.

 

 

On Thursday we were at the Orchard putting up the netting for the pole beans; it was a damp day.

 

 





Masa was up the ladder hammering the poles that the netting was attached to.

 

 

Stafford and Aimee attaching the netting to the poles. After this there was weeding to do; there is always weeding to do!

 

Attracting beneficial insects to your garden or farm

 

It is actually quite easy to attract beneficial insects to your garden because many of them like pollen and nectar bearing flowers. Parasitic wasps are so small they are hard to see but they feed on small flowers like alyssum. They will lay an egg inside an aphid or other host insect and when the egg hatches it will eat and kill its host. Hoverflies sometimes called flower flies are nectar and pollen eaters but their larvae are insectivores eating aphids, thrips and other plant-sucking insects.

 

 

Lady Beetles are also attracted to flowers because they will also eat nectar and pollen. The adult and larvae both are predators of many soft bodied pests such as aphids, mites and thrips. On the raspberry is a lady beetle larvae and below the adult.

 

 

Adding flowering plants is one way of attracting beneficial insects; creating habitat is another important way of attracting them. Learning about their lifecycles and what kind of habitat they like is a good starting point to help you figure out what to add or do in your garden or on your farm. Leaving areas in the garden untouched will help attract ground beetles because they like sod, leaf litter and rocks to hide away in and under.