Tomorrow will be our 2nd big Saturday of picking.  Business has been steady with the early part of the week relatively quiet and the latter part of the week building up to a big weekend.  We are working hard to keep the field producing at its maximum.  Early this week we had a huge rain event dump nearly 3 inches on us.  It was great for the young sweet corn plants but not so good for the strawberries.  At this stage rain is undesirable and is the cause for a number of diseases that require spraying to control.  One benefit of the rain was it helped put the brakes on a serious spider mite infestation that had spread throughout most of the field.  These critters are tiny spider looking mites that suck the juices out of the plant leaves.  They are about the size of the sharp point of a needle and require a 10x magnifying lens to see.  But they can devastate a field.  Unfortunately, there presence has required us to add a miticide spray to the fungicide spray program.  Letting them take over the field would result in the total loss of the plants and we hope to get 4 more weeks of strawberries. 

Our customers have been fantastic and we have received many nice comments on our field.  We are usually at work in the field right after dawn, mowing, irrigating, fertilizing, weeding, spreading fresh straw, followed by opening up when the first customer arrives around 9 am, then we stay busy running the farm stand, picking pre-pick strawberries and the greens for sale.  After closing at 7 pm, we clean things up, restock, and zip up the tents, and on some evenings we spray the field at dusk after the bees have settled back in their hives.  Every spray has a different requirement on dosage and how long the field must stay closed for picking.  We try to coordinate the sprayings and required field closures with an afterweekend shutdown to let the berries ripen.  Of course, the most important factor is what plant trouble or insect problem we are dealing with and the need to control it before the field is damaged. 

We are a professional operation now; we just added a porta-jon.  After a few kids came running up with a painful expression on their faces, we decided the porta-jon would likely avert some disasters.

Hopefully our field will stay healthy and continue producing sweet strawberries through the month of May.