Cold Weather Crops, Cold Weather Pests

Just because the weather is cooler and most of the bugs have gone away doesn’t mean that it’s smooth sailing for produce growers. It almost seems to be a law of the farm world: where there are crops, there are pests.

Winter pests come in different forms from summer pests. When the weather turns cold we trade in our small six-legged buggers for some larger four-legged ones. The two we are battling in our field right now are deer and coyotes.

Deer just can’t seem to be satisfied with grass. I guess it would get old eating the same wildflowers all the time. Whenever there is something small and green they can easily snack on, they usually will. Normally we don’t have much problem with deer because in order to get to our produce field they would have to cross large, open rowcrop fields to get to them. Deer generally try to avoid open clearings as we know from certain traumatizing Disney movies… But whenever they get the urge to adventure, they just love to snack on poor little strawberry plants and nibble off all their leaves! They have acres and acres of open grassland to munch on but decide to travel through a dangerous open field specifically to eat my strawberry plants! I don’t see how that makes much sense personally.

Coyotes are the other major winter pest but they don’t eat the crops. Instead they just like to destroy the lovely plastic you just put down for your field. I can’t for the life of me figure out the motive behind what the coyotes do. They like to grab onto the drip irrigation lines at the end of the rows and just pull on them tearing up the plastic. Some of the less creative coyotes will just dig holes in the middle of the plastic rows. It really does seem like they just want to mess us up with no other motive than that.

Even rabbits can cause damage throughout the winter. Winter crops like spinach and cabbage aren’t called rabbit food for nothing! I’ve even seen rabbits destroy young apple orchards during the winter. When the snow covers the grass and flowers that they like to eat, they will actually start to nibble on tree bark. If they nibble around the entire circumference of the tree at the bottom, it could kill the entire tree! Not really a problem for us at Piedmont Produce but it just goes to show how destructive something so little and seemingly innocent as a rabbit can be.

It seems like there is always something to watch for. It’s never easy is it?