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Janna Anderson: Posted on Tuesday, November 22, 2011 10:15 AM
 I often get asked "How do you keep the bugs off at your farm?"
Here's how! It's amazingly simple and serves two purposes to have row covers at our farm. Row covers keep the bugs out of the produce and help keep everything warmer which causes it to grow faster in cool weather. Additionally, a happy, healthy market farm must have continuous harvests, which is amazingly harder to do than you might think, due to weather fluctuations and reductions in daylight hours, but I can encourage growth to be easier to pick on a twice weekly basis by covering only part of the leafy greens in a row. The covered parts grow faster and harvest earlier even though they were planted at the same time.
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Miles of row covers
Each of our rows are 1/4 mile long, and the covers we put out are 25' wide. It makes it tricky to harvest and tricky to keep the covers on sometimes too!
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More covers
Sometimes we only need to cover a small section and uncover them frequently to check the progress of the plants underneath
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Even more covers to come.
While row covers are expensive and need to be replaced usually after one season, it is still much less expensive than using chemical pesticides to keep the bugs off and makes a very pretty product with no buggy holes in the greens, especially arugula.
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What's under the covers with the hoops!
Cucumbers and Zucchini- With a little luck, the zucchini and cucumbers can be coerced into producing for a little while longer if they grow under covers. But since they need to be pollinated to produce, the covers have to come off daily
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Carrots love tomatoes book is WRONG! LOL
If you have ever heard of companion planting as a way to keep bugs off your plants, here is proof that it really doesn't seem to deter the bugs at all. Planting within the season that the crop grows best is a better way to harvest happy healthy crops. Too soon and the bug pressure from the summer hits the plants hard, or too late and the plants can't grow in cool weather fast enough. Timing is everything in this business!
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Cayenne Peppers, changing colors like fall leaves in the cooler temps
Lots of cayenne peppers each season mature in the cooler weather just before the first frosts. I dry these every year and then grind them in the blender to make chile flakes for the rest of the season when it's too cold for the other peppers to grow.
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