Two Feet in the Dirt

It seems like we’ve skipped right over spring and headed into summer already. With hot, humid weather and severe thunderstorms almost every evening this week, it feels more like July than May. We lucked out earlier in the week, with two successive storms dropping large hail just a few miles away from us, but bypassing us completely. Unfortunately, on Tuesday night, we were on the tail end of an enormous storm system that dumped an inch of rain on the farm in just an hour. On Wednesday evening, we got the same thing again and in between has been days and days of steady rain.

As you can imagine, this is not the type of weather you can plan or prepare for. You just have to cross your fingers and hope you luck out and sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. We experienced significant damage on the farm on Tuesday night, although we are thankful as it could have been much worse. This is a particularly challenging time of year to have this happen as this is the week that we were planning to plant most of our summer crops. Not only did the rain cause us to decide to hold off on planting, meaning that peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes will all be a little later this year, but this also meant that there were a much higher proportion of beds on the farm that were bare dirt, waiting to be planted, which makes them significantly more susceptible to erosion. Entire sections of about 15 beds were washed away and will have to be rebuilt once the ground dries out. In addition, several crops that were not under row cover were heavily bruised by the intense rain and we had flooding in our hoop house. 

This is definitely one of those times when it’s easy to wish our jobs were a little less dependent on the unpredictable. It’s incredibly hard to see hours, days, and months of work wiped away over the course of an hour. Yet somehow, we still managed to bring in an enormous harvest for the market this weekend. Check out our full harvest list below and keep hoping that this horrendous spate of weather is over soon.

Farmers Katie & Mike

This week at the market

• Head Lettuce
• Baby Kale
• Full leaf kale (Curly Green and Dinosaur)
• Lettuce salad mix
• “The Works” salad mix
• Radishes
• Salad turnips
• Mustard Greens
• Arugula
• Spinach