If this first half of winter is any indication at all, the upcoming growing season could be a really crazy ride. After the extensive one-day melt-off, just four days ago, followed by an immediate plunge into bitter cold, the snow came back just as quickly with a one-day storm yesterday and through part of last night. I deliberately don’t watch much news anymore, but I did catch the weather report of this massive, North America-wide blizzard and/or ice storm, depending on where in its path you happened to be. (At the same time, I saw reports of weird heavy snow stranding millions in China, and freakish winter tornadoes somewhere else.) Well, here we didn’t get that heavy a blast, maybe six or eight inches, but enough to instantly restore classic winter conditions. The photo below is snow plowed aside in the barnyard this morning, the rail fence peeking out from behind is 5′ (1.5m) high. Now, it looks like 50°F (10°C) and rain for at least a day or two mid-week. If that happens, IT’LL ALL BE GONE AGAIN! This is the THIRD major full-snow-no-snow cycle so far this winter, and it looks like more to come. I know this extreme weather is a global thing, we’re ALL feeling something wild, but I figure, keeping a daily-or-so journal of what’s going on on THIS tiny farm, I ought to get it down anyway. For the record! :)
rain
Extreme farming…
Yesterday, the temperature decided to climb up to just over 40°F (5°C) and stay there for the day…and well into the night. Around midnight, it began to rain. By the time I peeked out this morning, it was back to bitter cold and frozen ground, but not before most of the snow had melted away. This seems really unusual, even for the weather extremes we’ve been having the last five years. It’s the second meltoff so far where the ground actually thawed out. Bob, who has an old school farmer’s memory of conditions going back a good 40 farming years, says THIS is the single weirdest winter he can recall…and it’s only half through. I’m not shocked. As I often (kinda… cheerfully) say to people, having started into this growing life exactly five seasons ago, crazy weather is all I’ve known! Before that, notable weather events were absolutely discrete, novelty items in my mind, there was no practical reason to connect one to the other and maintain any sort of continuous memory of conditions over the years…like farmers and gardeners do. Now that I do have a short bit of weather memory to work with, what it tells me is that, in the field, you really can’t count on ANYTHING at all, from one month to the next, and even less so from year to year. “Gone completely haywire” comes to mind. Garden accordingly… It really is tiny farming as an extreme sport!
Puddles on ice
Yesterday, it hovered a little above freezing, today, it rocketed up to nearly 50°F (10°C) and started to rain pretty good. There are puddles on paths where the snow was packed and icy (here, the reflection is Bob’s shed), patches of ground showing through in spots, and the overall snow level is dropping. It’s supposed to freeze up again tomorrow, but today’s 15-day weather forecast says there’ll be a string of warm days in early January that would melt things right down. Two winters in one? That’d shake up the trees and everything else living in the field. Wouldn’t be a surprise…!
Rainy day harvest fashion
Jo sports a borrowed rain jacket with snap-on drawstring hood, in striking work yellow—perfect protection for a rainy harvest day. Today was probably the wettest harvest Friday of the year, and it wasn’t bad. A couple of heavy downpours kept us indoors for quite a while (snapping farm fashion shots out of the Milkhouse door…), otherwise, a light drizzle for part of the afternoon hardly slowed us down. For the occasional wet work, Conall favors a full rainsuit, jacket and pants, while I so far make do with a hooded rain jacket—I’ll pop inside and wait out the heavier stuff. Lynn arrived after the major downpours. Today’s four-person crew made good time despite the weather. For the record: mesclun, spicy salad greens (arugula, mizuna, tatsoi, red mustard), collards, kale, spinach, radish, carrots, beets, green onion, summer squash, bok choi, tomato and potato (harvested yesterday), and garlic and onions from storage!!
Drought, what drought?
A week after the last couple of inches, it rained again today, a steady, fairly intense downpour that left about 1.5″ (38mm) in around an hour. It came down quick enough to leave huge puddles in a couple of low-lying sections. Pretty cool, they drained in less than 30 minutes, and it reminded me of what too much of a good thing can look like, as I imagined washed out seeds and floated seedlings in new fall beds if the rain just kept on going. Nothing like farm weather for bringing out the fickleness—extreme adaptability?—in people. It only takes a minute to go from cursing the lack of rain to hoping it’ll stop already. How excellent and effortless growing can be when the weather’s going right… Wouldn’t it be great to just take control of the weather (are they already doing it in China?). Yikes!
Oats
Promptly the day after the first rain in a while, OATS is surging up. Actually, strips of oats in one section planted a few days ago are appearing, the rest to hopefully follow just as vigorously. Oats anywhere but in a breakfast cereal bowl is a first for me. As a fall green manure cover crop, it’s an all new growing experience—if I didn’t know where this had come from, it’d look like an alarmingly healthy new weed attack…but it’s not. A couple of days ago, we seeded most of the open sections with an Earthway broadcast seeder (a simple, fun contraption, a bag with a shoulder strap that flings seed far and wide as you walk along turning the crank). In most sections, I used the rototiller on the Kubota compact tractor to till in the seed, skimming the surface in order to bury the seed no more than an inch or two. A couple of sections were raked so that the oats was lightly covered. In a couple more, the seed was left on the surface, a potential bird buffet. We’ll see what happens! Without the recent rain (we got another 1″/25mm today!), this wouldn’t have had much of a chance (oats needs to germinate by the end of August around here if it’s to get any growth on before winter kill)—we lucked out. So far, I’m liking oats!!
At last, rain!
Gloomy, overcast, a typical rainy day…and it actually rained! A couple of heavy downpours and a few gentler extended falls added up to a satisfying full inch (25mm) over a few hours. This is great timing for the second planting of summer squash, which is just starting to produce heavily, and for, well, everything else! Even the pond filled up nicely. It’s too late to make up for nearly three months of near zero rainfall, calculating that effect is best left to the quieter late fall and winter months, when the lessons of the season are reviewed and new year plans get firmed up. Right now, it’s all forward looking, week to week, harvest to harvest. Any decent rain is excellent!