Arghhhh!
Our seasoned farm share members know their way around an ugly potato and we’re hoping the rest of you are up for the challenge as well. A few of this year’s potato beds have been discovered by… wireworms. Boooo. Hissss. But whatever! We’re cool, we’re cool. Dealing with pests is part of this organic farming game and we accept it. Life can’t be flowers and strawberries all the time!
So, a refresher on the orange, crispy, little larvae that share our love of potatoes. Wireworms are the babies of click beetles which are small, copper-colored beetles that thrive in pastures with high organic matter. Unfortunately, high organic matter soil is what we organic farmers also love.
When we first started farming our current property, they were a new pest to us and existed in our soil in truly catastrophic quantities. We planted around 10,000 lettuce transplants that first summer here (we were used to growing lettuce for the grocery stores) in hopes that maybe a new bed or later timing date might help our lettuce growing cause. Nope! We grew absolutely zero lettuce. Or corn. Or potatoes. Oh and we had to pick about five gross worms out of each of our brassica transplants’ roots a few weeks after planting them in order to pull off any broccoli, cabbage, kale, brussels or cauliflower. Talk about crazy making! We persevered and found things that worked better than others, CSA members were understanding, and we’re still standing!
The more we’ve worked our soil, the fewer wireworms we’ve had to deal with, but they’re around lurking in the fields edges, which leads us to this week’s potatoes. Potatoes MUST be their favorite food, (next to pasture grass roots) and are recommended as a wireworm trap crop. A trap crop is something grows with the purpose of attracting a pest away from something more precious. Too bad the ideal trap crop is the food crop we’re going for in this situation. Thankfully, the damage is fairly superficial, albeit hideous. If you can’t stand the looks of these ugly roots, trade em away, or just get out your peeler and enjoy the goodness just below the potato skins.