While transplanting some fennel last week, I noticed some lacewing eggs on one of the baby plants. Unique among insect eggs, lacewing eggs are attached to a long silk thread protruding off the plant. This gives them a whimsical look (pictured below). This helps prevent predation and cannibalization when the first hatch in approximately five days.
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We've been having a very dry few years on our Fort Wayne uncertified organic farm. Let's time travel back to 2024. After a very dry summer, we finally got a bit of rain over a weekend in September: around 3/4” all told. Seems like a fever dream with all the rain we've been getting this spring, but this was our reality for about two years. 

This was bad news because, newsflash: plants need water to grow. Irrigation solves this issue during a drought, but one of the main concerns during drought is plant nutrition. Conventional fertilizers developed using fossil fuels work so well for two reasons:

Let's travel back in time to 2023. That year, there was a point mid-June when I thought we would lose our cucumber crop on our Fort Wayne farm. It wouldn’t have been a disaster--I have a second round of cucumber planting in midsummer, and they are fast to grow. But there would have been a break in the  cucumber action.
 
It was a particularly bad year for aphids, likely due to the warm winter in combination with a hot and dry spring. Aphids are tiny little green bugs drawn to the sugars in vegetables. They hide on the undersides of leaves and don’t harm the fruit. But left unchecked, they can stunt and ultimately kill the plant.