The Water Drains East Here: Summer Week #9 – 7/31/24

 In CSA Newsletter

The Water Drains East Here

In my front yard, there no longer remains any evidence that it rained and rained and rained for the early part of this season.  If you have a yard, probably you are seeing the same thing. The heavy rains and constant storms have seemed to subsided into a more normal summer. Tree wreckage has been cleaned up. Grass is still growing. Things seem relatively normal again.

However, in many parts of both of our fields, both at the J farm and the farm on Klevenville-Riley road, there is evidence of the damage of so much rain that came down so hard and fast.

Thirty percent of our green bean crop was flooded at points, so the plants are yellow and bearing no fruit. So far we are still able to get you a good amount of beans, but as our successions go southward the ground gets lower and there is more damage to the plants.

Our storage carrots planting got washed out by heavy rains. Instead of a carrot plant every inch, there is one every twelve inches if we are lucky. We tried to replant, but it’s getting too late in the season for a carrot crop to come out before the ground is too cold and wet in late fall. So we are expecting a drastically small fall carrot harvest.

Huge swaths of our melon plantings have nothing. Heavy rains poured over some of the successions when they were freshly transplanted and they did not survive.  Meanwhile, vegetable plants don’t like having wet ‘feet’. It suffocates them. Plants need water, yes, but too much suffocates them.

Where we see the biggest issue on our farm this season is in our pepper and eggplant plantings.  Our crop rotation has it such that this year those plants needed to go in our L2 and L3 fields. These fields on are the southeast corner of the farm on J. All of our water drains this direction. In drier years, this can be a wonderful placement for eggplant and peppers. In an overly wet year, it’s a sad sight. The ground on the east side of our farm is low – it borders a wetland. So in years where it rains a lot, the ground here gets saturated and STAYS saturated.  The plants are struggling to grow and produce. Usually healthy eggplant will be bushy and naval high with nice large fruits this time of year. Currently the plants are barely higher than my knee and the fruits are about half the size they should be. The pepper plants are showing similar signs of being stressed…. small, stunted plants with little-sized fruit.

There isn’t really anything we can do about it. When it doesn’t rain, we can irrigate. But when it rains too much, we can’t take the water out of the ground. There is no remedy. The water drains east here, and there is no changing that.

We will absolutely do our best to provide you with whatever eggplant and peppers the plants do provide, but please know that we probably won’t be able to give you as much as we have in years past. Such is the nature of agriculture! There is only so much we can control. The rest is out of our hands.