This week I visited and set up insect traps at John Bowne High School in Queens, NY. Here is the farm site:
Like last week, my supervisor Yolanda and I set up two Pitfall and two pan traps in between the rows. This farm was a bit different from Pink Houses in that instead of raised beds they used black plastic and reflective plastic covers on the vegetable rows, to help prevent weeds. Here are the traps we set up:
For the pitfall traps we set up one at the end of a row of tomatoes, in the soil, and one in between a row of tomatoes into the black plastic. We wondered whether the insects we collected would differ based on whether the trap was in the ground versus the plastic. The pan traps we placed on the black plastic between squash plants and peppers.
On Thursday I visited Oko Farms, our third farm location, to participate in their volunteer build. Since the farm is currently being built, we won’t be able to start insect trapping until July, while our other two locations we are starting in June. At Oko I helped dig trenches and remove rocks for the aquaponics system they are going to set up, which was a lot of work and required a lot of arm strength! Although the digging was tiring, I enjoyed getting to work in the beautiful location right next to the river. Here are some pictures of the farm I took:
Here are some pictures of digging the aquaponics trenches:
On Friday I returned to John Bowne to collect the insect traps and noticed that almost all the water in the pan traps had evaporated due to the high temperatures the past two days, which meant we did not catch as many insects as we likely would have if the water had not evaporated. I learned for the future to fill the traps with more water and to try to avoid extremely hot days.