Week 9 Newsletter

You have to be careful for what you wish for. Last week the other CSA farms in the area also wrote about how they wished for rain. We were all eagerly watching the skies for thunderheads and hoping the ones we spotted wouldn’t blow over. This week we are all writing about how we hope those thunderheads will keep on moving. After a 3-week dry spell we had about 5 inches of rain last week, the last downpour was on Saturday night. The farm is now really, really wet.
We are saving on diesel but the rain causes difficulties in other areas. The weeds are going to be a problem. We rely on timely cultivation with tractors to keep the weeds under control. We want to destroy the weeds before we can see them; we want them to be curled up just ready to pop out of the soil. Once we can see the weeds it is really too late for good weed control. We weren’t able to cultivate last week and we won’t be able to drive in the fields until later this week (if the weather stays dry). The crew has been working really hard at hand weeding the plastic crops, salad mix, and root crops but it will be difficult to keep up when the tractors can’t be in the fields.
Diseases are also a problem during wet weather. Especially in crops like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. As we wrote about last week, this family of plants is plagued by diseases that need wet weather to grow and spread. Diseases are also a problem in this family because we harvest from them for weeks at a time. Things like lettuce, broccoli, basil, and chard are harvested once and then are tilled under. Although this week’s planting of lettuce has suffered from the rain and has developed some rot so we may not be able to harvest it. Then we start harvesting the next planting. If the tomatoes or eggplant get a disease we often spread it to other plants when we harvest or trellis. We do plant three successions of tomatoes and two of peppers and eggplant to deal with the disease problem.
Growing vegetables in the northeast means we will have weeks with too much rain. So what do we do to deal with the inevitable? First of all, if you visit the farm you will notice we have a lot of equipment. Other farmers tease us about our many “toys”. But, this equipment allows us to get a lot of work done when the weather and soil conditions are just right. When the sun is out and the soil is dry we have to cultivate up to about 30 acres of vegetables. One small cultivating tractor just couldn’t get it done before the weather changed. So, we purchased another cultivating tractor. We also purchased a couple of other implements that we can pull behind our regular tractors for cultivating crops like corn, potatoes, and cabbage and between the rows of plastic mulch. If it looks like rain we can have two or three people cultivating to keep the farm clean. We also have a transplanter that allows us to plant a lot of transplants in one afternoon. We have to fit the transplanting in between the rain, harvesting, washing and packing, and the weeding. Three people can plant a week of broccoli, basil, and a couple of weeks of cauliflower in an afternoon. To some our farm looks over-equipped. But, when we have a window of opportunity between rain and other work, we can cultivate, transplant, prepare new ground, make beds, plant cover crops, mow cover crops, and make hay.
Our farm plan also takes into account wet weather. We plant our fields in sections divided by grass strips to prevent erosion during down-pours and consequent compaction from our harvest trucks. We work on having healthy soils that can absorb large amounts of rain fall. We plant sensitive crops in plastic mulch with high raised beds. If needed we take sections of fields that stay wet for too long out of production and plant them back in grass and clover for hay.
No matter what we do there will be times like last Wednesday when the crew was out slogging through the mud in the pouring rain to harvest bunches of beets. Sometimes we have to ignore our own comfort and what is best for the soil to do what needs to get done. They came back to the barn soaking wet and covered in mud from head to toe. Fortunately, they are a hardy bunch and take things like this in stride. We hope this won’t be a repeat performance and that we have a week of clear skies and dry weather. ~ Jody