Crop

The Markward Club honored its scholastic basketball award winners yesterday. With club secretary Andy Dougherty, they are (from left) Central's Tyrone Tyson, the club's choice as the Public League's top player; Penn Charter's Tim Krug, the city's top senior player; and Cardinal Dougherty's Cuttino Mobley, the Catholic League's top player.

The mice rot in their tunnels in a field Where phantom harvesters cut phantom grain. A poisoned acre grows a poisoned yield. Here skinny children stretch their hands in vain. Their swollen bellies hurt, and are not healed. A phantom blade has harvested their grain. Night after night I see this land annealed By draughts of fire and death that fall like rain. One poisoned acre poisons all the field. These are my crops. We harrow my domain, The one who pays counts all for which he's billed.

Finally, it's time to go all out and get the rest of the summer crops into the garden before the end of the month. Let's start with cucumbers and pumpkins. Cucumbers are finicky when it comes to soil temperatures, and the seeds will just rot if you plant them directly in the ground before the soil temperature is consistently about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. For this reason, it's best to start transplants from seed in early spring, or, if you haven't, to purchase small plants at a garden center.

MIDDLEBURG, Pa. - A Snyder County company that makes potato chips is having trouble because of the weather. Normally, Ira Middleswarth & Son gets eight tractor-trailer loads of potatoes from its supplier each week. Middleswarth Vice President Jeff Golf says his company is now getting only four. Golf says lack of rain is causing low potato yields throughout the South. Floods in the Midwest are causing trouble for the crop there. He's hoping to get potatoes from southern Virginia and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

For years, Ann and John Swan's Chester County garden has been one of my favorites because of the Swans' emphasis on vegetables. Onions, peppers, tomatoes and all kinds of lettuce and other leaf crops are beautifully grown with hardly a weed in sight, and there are always several new varieties under test. Long-season production is a hallmark of the Swan garden. Here are some thoughts from John Swan to encourage you to keep your own crops going a little longer this season: ONIONS.

At a time of the year when fat, red, luscious Jersey tomatoes are usually cheap and plentiful, they're not. Prices are erratic and quality is sporadic. Although good, fresh tomatoes can be found on roadside stands and in some supermarkets, there are a lot of disappointing tomatoes around. The Super Fresh market at 10th and South Streets in Philadelphia, for example, hasn't stocked any Jersey tomatoes this year because of "poor quality," according to its produce manager, Jack Fitts.

Great billows of white smoke can be seen the minute a car turns off Route 153 onto a long, narrow dirt road that crooks like an elbow into the center of Ed Lewis' valley, still brown with winter. The smoke means that Lewis is sugaring, just as he has for 36 years. It pours from the gaping hole in the roof of what once was a toolshed and now is his sugarhouse. Inside boils the sweet warmth of maple sap becoming syrup - the year's first harvest, the surest sign of spring. But inside the sugarhouse there is also grave concern.

South Jersey farmers in the Vineland area spotted the fungus about two weeks ago. Sweet basil plants were yellowing, and brown spores appeared on the underside of the herb's leaves. Though seen on other crops, downy mildew is relatively new to basil in the United States. It wiped out much of the crop on East Coast farms, including those in New Jersey, last summer. The aggressive disease was carried on the wind from the south, and, if it spreads as before, it will again discolor and disfigure the region's crop, reducing availability and likely driving up prices.

In the rolling hills east of the Catoctin Mountains, at the dead end of a lane on this sprawling U.S. Army installation, American scientists once stockpiled a fungus designed to destroy the Soviet wheat crop. Here they developed the "feather bomb," an aerial weapon loaded with turkey feathers carrying killer spores of stem rust of wheat. "I'm sure," said Charles Kingsolver, 85, one of the few surviving researchers on the program, "we could have caused considerable damage. " Now, 30 years after the United States ended its biological weapons program, scientists are preparing to counter the potential threat to U.S. crops and food supplies from the deliberate introduction of deadly organisms.

A Northampton farmer lost about $500 worth of his soybean crop early Tuesday morning after several youths took a joy ride through part of his 25- acre field off Worthington Mill Road. The joy ride ended about 1:15 a.m., after the driver of the Jeep Renegade, looking for a way out of the field, hit a steep embankment. The vehicle burst into flames. A passing motorist saw the burning vehicle and reported it to police and told them that three youths were in the car. Northampton Police Sgt. Bill Tomlinson said the joy riders had driven up and down the dirt lanes between the fields and then through some of the fields.

Want to try your hand at mushroom cultivation? The promise is that this hardwood log will produce a crop of organic shiitakes every two months for three years. Shiitake Mushroom Log, $29.95 at Williams Sonoma in King of Prussia or at www.williamsonoma.com . — Maureen Fitzgerald

Wind-whipped fires kept firefighters busy in the Pennsylvania suburbs Monday. A blaze broke out at 10:40 a.m. at the Abrams Run apartment complex at 90 Bill Smith Blvd., King of Prussia, and quickly went to two alarms, said Montgomery County public safety director Tom Sullivan. The occupants of 18 apartment units were safely evacuated, and no first responders were injured. The Red Cross was on the scene in the early afternoon making arrangements for the evacuees to stay elsewhere.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan sees an epidemic of sorts sweeping across America's farmland. It has little to do with the usual challenges, such as drought, rising fuel and feed prices, or crop-eating pests. The country's farmers and ranchers are getting older and there are fewer people standing in line to take their place. New Mexico has the highest average age of farmers and ranchers of any state at nearly 60 years old, and neighboring Arizona and Texas aren't far behind.

SEATTLE - A plot of grass sits in the middle of Seattle, within feet of a busy road and on a hill that overlooks the city's skyline. But it's no ordinary patch of green. Residents hope it will become one of the country's largest "food forests. " The park, which will start at two acres and grow to seven, will offer city dwellers a chance to pick apples, plums, and other crops right from the branch. "I think it's a great opportunity for the people of Seattle to able to connect to the environment," said Maureen Erbe, who walked her two dogs next to the plot on a recent overcast day. Would she pluck some fruits from the forest?

Mike Matz directs the Pew Environment Group's Campaign for America's Wilderness Seventy-five years ago, Theodor Geisel wrote the first of his 44 popular books for children under the pen name Dr. Seuss. Included among such fanciful classics as The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham is one of my family's all-time favorites, The Lorax . My wife and I can hardly wait to take our children to see the new film adaptation - not only for fun but because it explains so well what I do. One of the most recognizable quotes from The Lorax is: "I speak for the trees.

The Edible Balcony : Growing Fresh Produce in Small Spaces by Alex Mitchell (Rodale Books, $21.99) is a treat to look at - the shelves loaded with pots of lettuce, basil and thyme, the peas and blackberries scrambling skyward, and yes, even the borage blossoms encased in ice cubes for a cocktail on the balcony after dark. The author, a Londoner and former gardening columnist for the Sunday Telegraph, touches on window boxes, hanging baskets, "10 best easy crops," good pots, salvaged and recycled balconies.

By George Ball Last summer, I discovered a profound contradiction deep in the fertile soil of community gardening. First lady Michelle Obama has boldly proclaimed that the urban poor are at serious risk of deprivation of fresh produce. "Food deserts" stretch from border to border in the poor and underprivileged sections of every major American city. One of the ways she proposed to solve this problem is to expand the size and number of community gardens. However, there is also a stylish movement in contemporary gardening toward old-fashioned or "heirloom" vegetables that were popular in our grandparents' day. In community gardens everywhere, I see tall, rangy, low-yielding and romantically named heirloom varieties made popular by environmental activists.

WOODLAKE, Calif. - When Manuel Jimenez first set eyes on the land below a levee, thick with brush and weeds, the onetime fieldworker envisioned a place where youngsters could escape the temptations of gang life and learn about the Central Valley's most vital industry. But, like many places in California's farming belt, this Tulare County town of 7,280 flanked by citrus groves had few resources. Best known for its annual rodeo, Woodlake has been devastated by gangs. More than 40 percent of its families, many Latino immigrant farmworkers, live in poverty.

The Honeycrisp has become the Kim Kardashian of the apple world: It came out of nowhere, relatively recently (it was released commercially in the '90s), and with some marketing brilliance, took the fruit world by storm. Of course, there's a good reason people keep coming back to the Honeycrisp. It's sweet, uncontroversial, and delicious. It flies off the shelves, and keeps really well, which is why growers love it, too. Sort of. "Honeycrisp is by far the favorite apple," says Melissa Allen of Beechwood Orchards in Adams County.

FRESNO, Calif. - Dozens of foreign insects and plant diseases slipped undetected into the United States in the years after 9/11, when authorities were so focused on preventing another attack that they overlooked a pest explosion that threatened the quality of the nation's food supply. At the time, hundreds of agricultural scientists responsible for stopping invasive species at the border were reassigned to antiterrorism duties in the newly formed Homeland Security Department - a move scientists say cost billions of dollars in crop damage and eradication efforts.