Author name: Carrie Wager

Growing Huacatay

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Haucatay (otherwise known as “Nematocidal Marigold”, “Mexican Marigold”, or “Peruvian Black Mint”) is a plant that serves many purposes. At Patterson’s field in Wayland, we initially began growing it from seed in the 2021 season as a companion for our tomato plants.

A handful of Huacatay leaves freshly harvested from the tall plant in the background

As many home gardeners know, marigolds, in general, have many advantageous properties as companion plants, including attracting beneficial insects, repelling tomato hornworms, and protecting against root-knot nematodes. This particular species (Tagetes minuta) grows quite tall — on average about 7 feet, but I’ve also seen it grow higher than 10 feet in my personal community garden plot. Huacatay reseeds readily and transplants easily. In the Spring, we dig up self-seeded plants and relocate them to where we need them — usually amongst the tomatoes, where their tall stature is a good match for our large tomato plants.

In 2022, we learned that Huacatay is also a culturally important food for Latin American people who comprise the primary clientele base for our food pantry partner, La Colaborativa. It has a wonderful scent and a flavor that can be described as a combination of basil, spearmint, and citrus with hints of tarragon. It’s full of antioxidants and essential fatty acids and is used in both medicinal preparations and culinarily to flavor tea, soup, and sauces or pastes for meats, rice, and potatoes. La Colaborativa especially appreciates our harvests of this herb, which can be difficult to find fresh locally. This year we also packaged our final harvest as a dried herb that will be included in the Thanksgiving distribution.

Volunteer Farmer Loring packaging freshly harvested Huacatay for distribution to food pantry partner La Colaborativa
Camilo and David from La Colaborativa admiring our Huacatay during a recent visit to Patterson’s field
Huacatay in a bouquet with Hannah and Camilo
Huacatay dried for pantry distribution by Hannah

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Silage Tarps and Snakes

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We recently moved our 2400 square foot silage tarp from the location where we had it anchored all spring to a new location in the north corner of Patterson’s field. In doing so, we uncovered a large family of garter snakes who had been nesting under the tarp.

Silage tarps are used to eliminate weeds and create a stale seed bed. The weed seeds germinate due to the moist heat under the tarp, but then the seedlings die due to lack of light. The decaying matter feeds the earthworms, creating fertile weed-free soil to grow crops in.

We are fortunate to have an abundance of snakes in our field! They eat voles (which also like to hide under tarps) and thus provide a valuable service to our farming efforts.

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Winter garden work

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A few of us met in the field on this beautiful sunny day to check on our winter crops in the hoop house. The young plants look healthy, but they have been waiting during the past month for longer daylight hours before they can resume growing. 

Checking on the winter spinach and tatsoi in our hoop house

We have tried several strategies for making winterized windproof caterpillar tunnels, and found that we had to make a few repairs to some of our tunnels. Fortunately, they must have blown off during a windstorm that occurred in recent warmer weather, as the plants under them were not damaged by frosts. We are still learning a lot about this land, it’s challenges, and how to make use of limited supplies.

Our main task for the day was to put a small dent in our eradication effort of invasive bittersweet, which is strangling some of the large trees at the edge of the field. It will likely be a multi-year project to fully remove the bittersweet, but for our first efforts, we focused on freeing the trees from their strangulation by cutting the vines to the ground, and carefully gathering and bagging any berries from the brush that had been freed. Many of the berries were way too high in the trees for us to access at the moment, so we will likely have to pull seedlings again as they sprout in the Spring.

Asiatic bittersweet in the trees along our Wayland field

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