You can help!

My goodness!  What a wonderful yet overwhelming time of year to be a farmer.  Everything is growing marvelously, and the farm is wealthy in colors and textures and is generally bursting with abundance.   Just today, Olivia, Abigail and I savored the spring breeze by strolling along the zinnia bed right after we stopped for a snack in the strawberry patch.  Abigail, incidentally, seems to really enjoy the unripe ones, but when a girl is that cute and happy, why rock the boat?

However (so often a dreadful word, eh?), amidst all that beauty and plenitude, a number of uninvited guests are trying to crash our farm party.  From  the trillions of fungi that revel in our Florida humidity to the multiple generations of caterpillars and stink bugs, there are myriad reasons to feel that even the slightest bit of control that I think that I have is precarious.   The hard part, ironically, is that we are partly slowed by our own success:  There is so much to harvest!   Beans, zucchini, and cucumbers are particularly time consuming because they’re green.  (I abhor genetic modification, but, ” hey Monsanto! A neon orange bean would be much easier to pick!”)  Anyways, by the time we finally finish picking each day there is little time for frivolous pursuits like trying to fend off the impending onslaught of bugs and disease.  The most recent dream of mine is to make time in the day for smashing stink bug eggs.    These little golden egg clusters are everywhere, and if they escape my wrath and make it to adulthood they will use their piercing and sucking mouth parts to do untoward things to my precious ripening tomatoes.    But why am I telling you all of this, you may wonder?  Well, you can make a difference. Really!  Just come to market right as it opens and help us sell out in an hour so I can get back and defend my plants :)