So, here I am sitting in the kitchen, on a rainy Tuesday afternoon, drinking coffee from this morning, just after discovering cabbage loopers in our broccoli. The rain didn’t discourage me from picking them off, but the thunder was enough to send me inside.

Kelly is at the farmers’ market in Blue Earth today selling lettuces, greens and strawberries. I hope she is doing okay with the rain. I was planning on transplanting cucumbers and eggplant today, but that won’t happen, it’s too wet. It is a very busy time of the season, with still a lot of planting, transplanting, and at the same time picking the first fruits of the garden, watching for bugs, weeding and irrigating.

I am becoming very fond of drip irrigation, first it looked too complicated to me, to design it for the whole garden, but with a consistent bed system it is very easy and rewarding. All I needed was some piping for main water lines, a huge roll of drip tape, connectors, a pressure reduction and filtering device, and a back without pain to connect it all on the ground.

There are a lot of pros of drip irrigation: time saving, water saving, plant health, but one con is no place to recycle plastic drip  tapes, to my knowledge. I am hoping it will change, as more people use it, along with a hoop house plastic too. There is a demand already to recycle this stuff. What we are doing is asking manufacturers if they recycle it. The answer is “no,” but the more people will ask, a change might come.

It stopped raining, so there won’t be time to make a strawberry pie. I am not a pro in that field (there is no such thing as a pie crust in Poland, we eat cakes plus yeast based pies, and babka’s, but we don’t know classic American pies), but I was hoping to make one anyways, since Kelly’s Grandma is on vacation. Maybe next rainfall.

For now, watch out cabbage loopers, I’m coming back!