I thought last week was the peak of the season but along comes this week. I hope you cleared space in your fridge!
Here are a couple of announcements:
Still taking back pint size clam shells.
If anyone is interested in helping process garlic please let me know. We’ll be starting the project sometime soon.
I always ask for comments, suggestions, questions, etc. at the end of the newsletter but rarely get any. So I decided to put it up at the top to see if the number increases. Let me know how the season is going for you. I’d like to know the good, the bad and the ugly so we can react accordingly. Also send in your questions so I no longer have to talk about the weather.
Weather (Formerly Farm) News
Our main topic tonight is the weather’s inability to stop drooling on us. This season is much like last season when we had a long drought followed by an August filled with nothing but rain. Ugh.
This past week alone we had four days of rain for a total of 5 1/8″! On the 24th when most of your were enjoying sunny weather we had 1 3/4″ of rain in about 20 minutes. Not good. If I hear one more TV weather person say “we need the rain for the farmers” I’m going to scream! Actually I did scream the last time I heard it but that was even before this latest onslaught of wet weather.
So lets break down why rain is so harmful to farming. First, it isn’t rain but the amount, the rate and the frequency. I’ve asked numerous times — and so far without success — that I get one inch of rain every Friday evening spread over several hours. Is this really too much to ask? Have it start around 2:30 am so the people leaving the bars don’t get drenched and end right around 6:30 so the early risers can get a morning walk in. A quarter inch per hour. How hard can that be? The rest of the week should be sunny with high temps around 80 and lows in the mid sixties. This seems doable to me.
Instead we get the equivalent of 5 1/4″ of rain per hour (though thankfully for only 20 minutes). My gravel driveway is not happy nor is my gravel budget. These blasts of rain erode the driveway and the slopping areas of our farm. We have grassy areas to stop the soil from leaving the farm but it doesn’t stop the soil from relocating on the farm. Then when the soil is saturated any new rain exacerbates the erosion problems.
When we get frequent rain we get frequent and persistent dew and constantly wet plants. You know what likes wet plants? Diseases! Lots of diseases. So with this month being so wet we have seen a large uptick in disease pressure on our farm. Last year some may recall — and I hesitate to bring it up since it will flare my PTSD — we lost almost all of our winter squash to an unusual disease — the fungus Geotrichum candidum — not typically found in squash. I have to believe this problem was caused by the large volume and frequency of rain we received last August. My hope is this year is not a repeat of last year.
But there are a whole list of other diseases that proliferate in the wet conditions. Tomato plants typically lose the battle to the myriad of diseases once we get into this type of weather pattern. Broccoli gets a problem called “brown bead” where the flower buds (that is what you actually eat with broccoli — flower buds, weird huh?) die and turn brown. We lost a lot of broccoli earlier this month due to brown bead. When I first started farming I didn’t understand why seed descriptions for broccoli emphasized “well domed heads”. Now I know. Water flows off of domes. No water sitting on the head, no brown bead issues.
Pests also become a problem. One example is cabbage worms (actually caterpillars but farm lingo inertia has solidified the term “worm” into the farm lexicon). They are quite susceptible to a bacteria – Bacillus thuringiensis — so if they eat it they will perish. But if you spray some on the target plants and it rains, the rain washes the bt off the plant and it won’t be eaten. Thus it won’t kill the “worms”. So be aware that some of your brassicas (e.g. broccoli and cauliflower in particular) may have a few green “worms” enjoying a bit of your produce.
Another problem with all this rain is that we can’t efficiently dig (and with the latest rain dig at all) the root crops. With the soil so saturated driving equipment on the soil will compact it and turn it into concrete. Plus even with the spiffy, brand new tires the tractor can’t get enough traction to move the implements through the soil. Deep soil can quickly fill deep treads. We hoped to dig some of the potatoes these last several weeks but with tractor problems followed by all the rain the circumstances just weren’t conducive to the digging. Hopefully by the end of this week we’ll find the time. If you are interested in digging potatoes plan to come out Friday! Contact me first in case something changes.
So if I had my druthers (do the kids these days say “druthers”?) I would rather have no rain than all the rain we’ve had lately. At least we have (until we run out of course) enough water to irrigate the crops.
What will we have this week?
Hopefully not more rain. We will have lots and lots of beans! (We don’t wash beans since wet beans mold in the cooler so be aware that some beans may be a bit dirty from the rain splashing the soil). Lots of tomatoes. (See beans above). Lots of corn. Broccoli, cauliflowers, tomatillos, cherry tomatoes, lots of cucumbers! We’ll also have onions, some peppers, a few remaining melons, some watermelons, very few eggplants (not a good eggplant year for many reasons), still more summer squash/zucchini (I feel like we’ll still be harvesting it in December!), maybe kale though we have so much of everything else we may not get to it. And of course the usual other things I’ve forgotten.
Only Flowers this week.
No recipe of the week due to too much to do.
Joke of the Week
What made the green bean turn red?
It saw the salad dressing.
As always, send in your questions, comments, suggestions, jokes, puzzlers, etc.