A NOTE FROM FARMER AL
Dear CSA Members, Waging War with The Earwig We’ve never seen a year like this. It’ll go down in the annals of Frog Hollow Farm history as the “Year of the Earwig.” They specialize in night-time invasion, crawling up the branches literally in armies and mangling individual fruits with deep gouges, rendering them scarred and misshapen! It’s DEVASTATING! So we have two strategies to deal with these slithery, shiny, stealthy little armored critters. One is to physically capture and kill by burning. To do this we put down 10” pieces of drip tubing, which is a black plastic hose about 3⁄4” in diameter. The earwigs, upon descending back down the tree at dawn, will seek the warmth and shelter of these black cylinders. My ground crew will then walk from tree to tree, carrying the ubiquitous 5 gallon buckets, stoop- ing down to carefully pick up the tube and empty the earwigs into the bucket. After a few hours of doing this, acre by acre, I inspect the buckets. The bot- toms of each bucket are covered in a 1⁄2 inch thick layer of the nasty critters; a quivering mass of legs and antennae, all to be dumped into a metal container and burned in a bath of gasoline. The other method is to spray the trees at night, when the earwigs are up there, feeding. We use “Entrust,” which is an organic insecticide containing naturally occurring soil bacterium called “spinosad.” This is yet another way organic farmers are using bacteria as our allies.
