Companions, Pests, and Market Day

This week our class learned a lot about the relationship between organisms. It was interesting to learn how some plants compliment each other while others don't. For example if you plant strawberries with beans it helps both of these two plants grow. We also realized how huge of a problem pests are. 

Throughout our time on the farm we have seen many fruits and vegetables be eaten up by our vole infestation. This has been persisting a problem throughout the semester. Part of farming is dealing with the pests eating produce. We have learned this through first hand experience since we have been out here. We have also learned in class the putting out poisons or pesticides ends up hurting more than helping. Given that our pest problem was voles we just set out traps to dispose of the problem. 

Also, during this week we went out to the Redwood marsh to learn more about what the RHS Farmland looked like before landfill was added. From our time out in the Redwood marsh we were able to learn what we needed to do to mimic nature. For example, in the Redwood marsh more grasses and smaller bushes are in the middle of the marsh where trees and taller bushes grow on the outer ring. If you look at the RHS farm you will see that we have also done the very same thing. Trees tend not to like too much water on their roots so at a higher elevation their roots aren't going to be exposed to the sitting fresh water on top of the landfill. 

We also were able to observe the importance of having tertiary consumers at the marsh. These tertiary consumers help the ecosystem by limiting the amount of primary consumers so they won't wipe out the producers. In our farm the vole is an example of how we don't have a great amount of tertiary consumers to limit the voles from eating all of our produce. The vole is also a good indicator species showing us that we might not be picking our produce soon enough. 

However, we still have been getting quite a good yield of produce to sell at our market which happened this Friday.

—Josh D.