Anyone else feeling the fall spooks?
It’s fall-tober, folks. Few of us can deny it. The rate of leaves changing is steadily picking up pace. Rainy days have gone from sweet moments of temporary relief to long stretches of dodging puddles at the risk of turning fresh warm socks into soggy wet feet. There’s a spooky greeting around every which corner of your neighborhood (probably), signaling that spooky feeling we all get this time of year.
It’s the fall spooks! Boo! We’ve got them out here too. But rather than fake bush cobwebs, skeletons, and ghosts we’ve got…critters. Vampire critters! Bwahahaha!
They’re called aphids, and they cause all sorts of bug-sized trouble. Every farmer knows what an aphid is. They bring a certain level of terror to every corner of a farm basically all year long. This time of year, though, they may as well be known as nature's vampires since they’ve got nothing better to do than suck all of the sweet sap out of all sorts of common green crops.
Boo!
I knew they loved the turnips and the bok choy. But after many, many weeks of navigating aphids on harvest days, they did more than colonize the stems of plants that can easily be ripped off or rinsed. They…made me late! Ahhhhhh!
It was 3:30 on a Tuesday. Not time to go home, but home wasn’t too far off. At least that’s what I thought. While washing the lettuce mix in the bubbler, I noticed something funny in the water. Just between the leaves, I saw many little specs with tiny little legs. I got a closer look and right before my eyes, there were many, many aphids in the water! Ahhh!
I thought to myself, “no, this can’t be true.” But it was! The reality was that there were more aphids than usual in all of our harvested lettuce mix, which meant I was going to have to double wash all the lettuce mix, making me 30 minutes late to a prior engagement! Eeeeeep!
Yep, it gets a little spooky out here when you’ve got a small crew and the work has to get done. No one is safe from the realities of spook-tober, where the weather turns colder, and you think the season is going to start winding down, but somehow the projects get bigger. Bwahaha!
Like the monster-sized sweet potatoes we had to sort through during Wednesday’s work share. For the next few weeks, you can throw 2 pound bags of sweet potatoes into your carts, as well as storage squash and shallots! Woohoo! We’ll give you a couple of tiny tubers for now, but be on the lookout for the spooky tubers; any sweet potato weighing in at nearly 4 pounds should be referred to as a spooky tuber, if you ask me.
But the spookiest thing that happens on Hawkins Farm is the forgotten meat we find in silver thermal bags when we are resetting on Fridays. Don’t forget your meat when you pick up your shares, people! It will haunt you for weeks and weeks to come!
-Alex
