WEEK #25: Pest Pressures, Pressure Canners & Solar Power

Our first heat wave of the year was this weekend.  Temperatures were up to 31 degrees Celsius with the humidex reaching near 40 degrees. While outside during the day, the chickens often hung out in the shade underneath thire coop.  Every night they still retire inside the coop, except for the odd hen that prefers to roost in the cedar tree......Every night we have to go fetch her and bring her inside.

Most of our vegetables that are now up are doing fairly well, those that didn't come up have been replaced.  Aaron filled these empty spots with more carrots, lettuce, and some sweet corn seeds. 

Our potatoes, all in blossom.  Photo by Marianne Balkwill

We made some markers to identify the crops and placed them out in the gardens this week as well. 

Of course with all these succulent vegetables, we are going to get some insect pests.  Right now the main pest are Leaf Miners in our beet leaves.  Though the leaves are edible to us, the leaf miners only do attack the leaves not the root. 

For those who don't know, Leaf Miners are true flies (order Diptera). They are small yellow and black coloured flies whose larvae tunnel while they feed (creating mines) in the leaves of plants.  If you ever observe light coloured trails on the leaves of your flowers, you may in fact have a Leaf Miner larva in them.

There aren't too many good chemicals out there to combat these pests, so we are just removing the leaves (a cheaper and more practical approach) that have these little blobs in them and feed them to the chickens.

 A beet leaf with Leaf Miner damage.  The larva (or larvae) inside make little mines as they feed inside to the leaf.  Photo by Marianne Balkwill

 



Detail of the leaf with 3 Leaf Miner larvae feeding inside.

Another pest we have right now are aphids in our goldenrod surrounding a few garden plots. These "Goldenrod Aphids" a large and red.  They seem to only favour the goldenrod and nothing else.  We are pulling out a lot of goldenrod so it doesn't take over the back field as we want to plant some indigenous wildflowers in the future.  Some of these goldenrod patches have created banker plant areas attracting beneficial insects such as ladybugs and lacewings that feed on many species of aphids that may infest our crops. We will leave these patches for now.

Bright red aphids cover the stalk of this goldenrod while two adult ladybugs feed on them.  A ladybug larva, which looks nothing like the adult, is near the top of the plant looking for prey as well.  Photo by Marianne Balkwill.

Since we got back from vacation, Aaron ordered a pressure cooker/canner online.  It came this week and it is huge!  Unlike traditional canning, a pressure cooker/canner provides the only safe means for canning non-acidic foods like vegetables, fish, meat, and chicken.

All American Pressure Cooker/Canner 930

Unfortunately, the word from Hydro One is that there is not enough capacity on the grid out our way to supply hydro via solar panels, so we won't be able to sign up with the government MicroFIT program.  I guess we may have to do it our own way in the future by purchasing the occasional solar panel and battery while we slowly work our way towards off grid independence.