Hot Humid Dry to Wet

The sweltering heat continues. Numerous rainstorms and Friday's brief cool down provided some nice relief. A few more days of super-heat this week then it looks like we'll descend back into more tolerable working conditions. It is July which traditionally seems to be our hottest and wettest month. I'm not sure how many days have been above 90 this month but I would guess 90%. Precipitation has eclipsed the 6" mark with about a week to go but doesn't feel like too much just yet. After the 1.2" Thursday night/Friday morning the ponds were filled to capacity once again. I haven't scoped out all the fields since that deluge but am hopeful there wasn't much soil disturbance, though the lower pond was pretty turbid. Due to increased impervious surfaces on neighbors' properties upstream there's been an increase in stream scouring of tributaries feeding our ponds, which is likely the source of suspended soil particles.

Big harvests are continuing. Forty percent of the onions (approximately 1,250lbs) have been safely stowed and today the next round will be pulled and left in the sun to hopefully dry and cure for a few days before being put in cold dry storage. After the onions we'll begin harvesting the early variety of potatoes - Dark Red Norland - after the tops die back and they cure and heal in the soil, probably early to mid August.

Desperate un-irrigated crops received some much needed rain last week. I'm perennially amazed by our crops' ability to tolerate hot and dry conditions. Little transplants went into raised beds a week before last Wednesday evening's light soaking rain and survived healthily for a whole week of blazing sunshine and very high temperatures. This is when I'm most thankful and appreciative of our relatively heavy north-facing soils. Those transplants should now grow like mad but also wanting to sprout and thrive are the weeds. With the numerous soakings last week the thousands of bed feet of transplants will need some timely cultivation of the germinating weeds while they're at the vulnerable thread stage. Since there is so much bare ground to work we'll probably utilize the tractor and our antique basket weeder for some of this work. We'll still need to manually hoe in between plants, but the tractor should save us hours of cultivating.

This coming week we'll also probably try to harvest the last of the onions so please join us for a workshift to help!