This was one of the strangest single days for weather that I can remember. Transplanting more squash in the morning—Michelle is checking out working on the farm one day a week—it was beautifully sunny, with a nice breeze. Around mid-morning, suddenly, it shifted to humid and sticky. I headed in to change into shorts, but before I’d even walked out of the field, the humidity started fading again, so I didn’t bother. A bit later, covering the squash with row cover, a nice breeze from the north, enough to easily float the cover, casually shifted 180°, coming from the south, in the 20 minutes it took to lay down the cover and unfurl the next. Early afternoon, the wind picked up, and within half an hour what had been a largely clear sky had totally clouded over, then, pounding rain and HAIL (not too big, only some leaves got battered, no smashed plants, you can used the bottlecap below for scale). Then back to calm and clear for a couple of hours. Then heavy clouds again, and a massive wind storm that tore some branches off of trees. Then back to…sunny. As extreme as this day’s been, two or three quite drastic changes in a single day have been happening quite a lot recently. This is our new weather…?
rain
Where we’re at…
If you can average a month’s weather with one photo, this is pretty well it for the days of May this year, hovering between bright and sunny and gloomy and overcast, veering one way or another for a day or two, or even from one end of the day to the other. The freezing nights have just let up, which is good. We’ve also been getting a nice amount of rain: the month’s average so far is that magic inch-a-week (25mm), the veggie gardening rule of thumb for perfect rainfall. Many hours of dragging around and positioning hoses and sprinklers, and gassing up the irrigation pump, have been SAVED! That’s a big bonus, the total opposite of the last two years. The field is clear and amazingly weed-free (at a distance, at least)—more sun would benefit both the direct-seeded crops and the (kinda evil) pigweed. Less sun and cooler temperatures are also great for transplanting, which is the main thing going on right now. So it’s a toss-up, but I’m slightly more liking the colder, cloudier weather for now than not. As if I had a choice… :)
First market 2008…
Heavily overcast, downright chilly, with rain threatening at any moment…still, a great first day at the market! In all the excitement, I forgot to take a picture of the stand as it was when we started, it looked good for a tiny spread of three trays… We sold out of mesclun and spinach in a couple of hours, while the Jerusalem artichoke, a veg that like as not had NEVER before been seen at this market, lasted all day but turned out to be a bit of a hit, with maybe 10lbs (4.5kg) sold! A bit of sage, thyme, oregano and chives rounded things out. This early in the season, the vendors were almost all crafts and prepared stuff—baked goods, cheese curd, maple syrup,…—and crafts, plus bedding plants and some fresh produce: storage potatoes, rhubarb, one stand with wild leek… And the traffic wasn’t huge, no surprise, especially with the weather. BUT, chatting with other vendors and regular customers for the first time after the winter was excellent! Really, connecting with people through fresh food at the farmers’ market makes tiny farming all make sense to me…
Green day
It’s a gray day today, as it’s been for most of the last few, but out in the field, it feels green. We’re at about 1.5″ (37cm) of rain in total, and the ground is nicely soaked (and a little too wet to work). The grass surrounding the garden is looking particularly inviting this year, since today’s lush green carpet is tomorrow’s GRASS MULCH. The temperature is up as well, and some sunshine is on the way (no doubt…). All in all, everything’s a little delayed, but looking pretty good!
Puddle gauge
Ah, it’s really raining now… Still chilly, but wet! The jumbo rain gauge, entering its third season, is definitely a winner when it comes to recording in millimeters how much rain actually came down, BUT, the puddle on the path outside the Milkhouse front door is really the first line of rainfall appreciation. It’s amazing how heavy a downpour can look, sound and FEEL, without delivering much water at all. But the puddle doesn’t lie. It takes about a half inch (12mm) of rain within a few hours for it to even show up, so once it’s there, you know it’s good times for growing… No numbers to process, just…RAIN!
Freezing rain
You hear quite a lot of “freezing rain” warnings over the course a year around here, but it’s something you seldom actually SEE. If you’re driving, it means treacherous invisible ice on the roads. Otherwise, it seems like…rain. This morning, the freezing rain was a little more interesting, a fairly fine, steady drizzle that more or less froze to most surfaces on contact, coating them with ice. Here’s how it looked through the glass window of the east-facing greenhouse door. Outside, that’s the farm stand (reflected, that’s me, hooded, and the hoophouse ribs)… If you’ve ever played with Photoshop, this is the REAL version of one of the basic special effects—except here you can’t play with the settings… ;) Kinda cool, and the sort of thing you pay attention to when you’re obsessively watching the weather forecasts, waiting for the rainy, cloudy cold snap to break (Tuesday?!) so the field can dry out, so you can get on with tilling, and seed those first PEAS already. Freezing rain!!!