After a week of poor air quality, some extremely hot days, and then a downpour, the week ahead is looking like it will be lovely for catching up on field work. Most plants are thriving with the heat and regular rainfall, and we’re entering the exciting and intensely busy part of summer where farmers are planting, maintaining, and harvesting all at once.
Farm Hacks
While many of our readers are experienced farmers, we know plenty of our readers are just getting started. There are simple “hacks” that may seem obvious to folks who have worked on or visited their fair share of vegetable farms, but are not necessarily intuitive. For the next few weeks, we’ll highlight some “farm hacks” that save farmers time and money.
- Pick your own: we mostly think of berries and pumpkins when we think of pick your own crops, but there are plenty of vegetables that just make sense as pick your own veggies rather than farmer picked veggies. Green beans, peas, small cherry tomatoes, and certain cut flowers are customer favorites, but they take so much time for the farmer to harvest that they often don’t pencil out financially. If you have people visiting your farm to pick up their CSAs, or visiting your farm stand, consider planting a small garden where people can pick their own labor intensive crops. As a customer, you get the best of both worlds - you can pick up most of your veggies from the farm stand or your box, but still have a mini agritourism experience.
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| Pick-your-own peas in Northfield. Photo: Natalie Hoidal |
- Spools! Vegetable farming comes with many tools / products that need to be rolled out over long distances like row cover, plastic mulch, drip tape, etc. Using spools can make this process so much more efficient. On a very small scale, you can stick a hoe or a broom handle through a spool of drip tape and pull the tape down the field rather than lugging the spool down each row. On a larger scale, some growers use pool cover spools with wheels that can be dragged behind tractors to store, roll out, and roll back row cover.
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| A hoe stuck through the middle of a drip tape spool allows you to keep the spool at the head of the field and quickly / easily pull the tape to the end of the row. Photo: Natalie Hoidal |
Catching up with weeds
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| Mature lambsquarter plant setting seed in a nearly mature sweet corn field in Waseca. Photo: Charlie Rohwer |
The downside of regular, gentle rains is that just like our crops, the weeds are thriving this year. We’re reaching the point in the season where many common weeds are starting to flower and set seeds. A single lambsquarter plant can set 30,000-176,000 seeds, and they remain viable in the soil for more than 10 years. Taking the time to clean up weedy fields now will reduce your labor for years to come.
Re-vamping your farmers market booth and setting prices
Extension educator and farmer Ryan Pesch is releasing a series of videos about having a successful farmers market season. Check out his most recent video about reviewing your market prices and sprucing up your stall.
Crop updates
Cucurbits
We’re seeing extensive blossom end rot and poor pollination in summer squash and zucchini. While the weather this season has been overall pretty good for most crops, shifting between cool, wet weather to very hot weather in rapid succession is less than ideal for the very sensitive flowering requirements of cucurbit crops. We shared some photos with our counterpart Dan Fillius in Iowa, and he agreed that zucchini is the “frontrunner for worst crop of the year”. So, if you’re having problems, you’re not alone!
Field cucumber: Production really ramped up this week. High tunnel cucumbers bred for all female flowers (gynoecious) and for producing un-pollinated fruit (parthenocarpic) really shine in years like this one where field pollination is spotty.
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| Blossom end rot in zucchini. Photo: Natalie Hoidal |
Cover crops
We’ve seen some beautiful cover crop fields this week. As spring crops are being harvested and you’re considering your next cover crop plantings, remember that giving your cover crop a little bit of nitrogen can go a long way to achieving all of its potential benefits. Around 50 lbs / acre of nitrogen is recommended for sorghum sudangrass, a commonly planted cover crop this time of year since it does well in heat and can produce a lot of biomass by fall. Providing nitrogen increases overall biomass substantially.
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| Sorghum-Sudan grass off to a good start in Waseca. Photo: Charlie Rohwer |
Peppers
Peppers are putting on some growth as we have warmer days. We are starting to see bacterial spot crop up in some fields, especially in parts of the state that have gotten more rain or in low spots where water sits a little longer. Bacterial spot symptoms start as yellow spots, as the spots enlarge the center of the spots turns brown and sometimes falls out. This disease sometimes gets into the pepper fruit, causing white and brown spots on the fruit. Copper is the main management tool we have, but its efficacy can be really mixed. Make plans for next year if you’re seeing this disease now – make sure to rotate, don’t save seeds, and work on moisture management.
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| Bacterial spot on peppers leave. Photo: Dan Egel, Purdue University. |
Sweet corn
Harvest is still a couple of weeks away for most growers. Our colleague Charlie Rohwer manages sweet corn trials in Waseca, and he’s reporting lower ears than normal this year. Does this matter? It mostly just matters for ease of picking - if you have to bend down further, it’s harder on your back, and lower ears are trickier for mechanized harvest equipment. Lower ears may also be easier for raccoons to access.
We have gotten questions about Corn Earworm monitoring. With the retirement of Bill Hutchinson, UMN is not running a trapping network. The best thing you can do is run traps on your own farm, this webpage from Michigan State lays where to buy supplies and how to trap for corn earworm. If that isn’t in the cards, Insect Forecast is a website that overlays what we know about pest migration with weather models to predict when we might get corn earworm flights. It is far from perfect, but is one source of info we can use.
Garlic
Garlic harvest has begun! Wondering if you're ready to harvest? There are two main ways to determine whether your garlic is ready: when about half of the leaves turn brown is a fairly reliable indicator of maturity. You can also harvest a few bulbs and cut them in half. If the cloves fill the skin, they are ready.
We continue to get weekly questions about aster yellows in garlic. From what we have seen so far, it seems like most of the damage is carryover from infected seed, just based on how early the symptoms were showing up. Most growers we’ve visited were able to very quickly identify which plants were infected and weed them out. As garlic harvest approaches (or is here on some farms), stay vigilant about seed sorting and only keeping disease-free seed.
Carrots
Fall carrots are being planted. Fall carrot timing is always a gamble, since they become sweeter after a frost, but if we happen to get a lot of rain in the fall, it can be hard to get into the field for harvest later in the season. The best bet for many growers is to simply plant at least a few successions. Late July is really the last window of time for most MN growers to plant carrots that can be reliably harvested.
Tomatoes
Leaf spot diseases are making themselves known. We are mostly seeing fungal diseases at this point, with early blight cropping up everywhere we’ve been. Review diseases that cause tomato leaf spots and their management in Spotty tomato leaves - what is it and what to do.
We’ve also had sightings of Minnesota’s main tomato leaf feeder- Tomato Hornworm. Big (a few inches), muscular, and very hungry, these guys can mow through a lot of tomato leaves (and sometime fruit) in their life. Occasional hornworms in a large planting aren’t anything to worry about, but if you are seeing a lot of defoliated plants or have a small planting, physical removal is a good option (though even by entomologist standards, this an intimidating (but not dangerous) bug to handle). Despite their large size, finding these guys on a plant can be a humbling experience. Look for large, grenade shaped poops, then look up for help finding the caterpillar. |
| Tomato hornworm. Photo: Natalie Hoidal |
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