Tuesday, June 2, 2009

The Potatoes ARE Alive!


It's always soooo, well, encouraging when something grows. It's hard to believe those little chunks of dirty, shrunken stuff can become big, beautiful plants! The potatoes are coming!! The potatoes are coming!! Soon after, of course, will come the dreaded potato beetle, the scourge of the Prairie potato farmer, especially the organic potato farmer. Those little beetles, and their really little babies, can decimate a plant in a day. This year we're going to throw everything we've got at them (and everything we've been reading about)! Rodale says wheat bran, which expands in their stomachs and they explode. Okay...... Read somewhere else diatomaceous earth scratches them up and they dry up. Sure.....Foliar kelp sprays to keep the potatoes so healthy they resist the bugs. Can do!! If we won the lottery, we'd get some spinosad - that naturally occurring bacteria that specifically kills potato beetle and doesn't harm the birds, bees or lady bugs. And whatever happened to Btt, we can't find it anywhere? Well, the battle commences and we'll keep you updated!

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