Adapting to Unpredictable Weather

The weather patterns are becoming more and more unpredictable. And this fact is truest during the turbulent season of summer. Just when you think it’s a beautiful and sunny day, you hear a crack of thunder and run for cover as heavy droplets fall from the sky. This has happened to us many times throughout the summer and we just watch anxiously hoping our newly seeded beds don’t get washed out. With weather patterns changing and becoming more unpredictable, farmers and others who make their livelihoods from the land have had to learn how to adapt their knowledge to efficiently fit in with the new natural landscapes.

Just within this past year, we never really had a real winter to speak of. This has made our bug population very happy, but our leafy green eaters very sad. We’re basically in a constant battle against squash bugs, harlequins, Japanese beetles, and flea beetles, just to name a few. Your favorite leafy greens tend to look a bit different in the summer if your farmers don’t use pesticides, which we have promised to not. Many of our favorite greens will have fairly extensive flea beetle damage throughout the warm months. These greens are still perfectly good to ea. They just may not be as pretty to look at.

We also had one of the longest and mildest springs I can remember in a while. We were wearing jackets up into early June and experienced a Mother’s Day frost from which we’re still recovering. We lost many of our tomato and pepper plants to that extremely late frost and we’re just now seeing them make a comeback. This weekend we experience a pretty intense storm that uprooted many of our trees and flooded a few of our beds. While we’re still working to get all these things back in order, we were very sad to say goodbye to some of our favorite old trees, as well as all that time we lost trying to get some equipment unstuck from the new swamp that has taken up residence in one of our fields.

We’re so fortunate though to have such a wonderfully supportive community. You all help us roll with the punches and work together to find quick solutions to our newest weather crises. You can try to plan for just about anything in farming, but sometimes nature has a different plan and you just have to work around it. We want to thank you all for showing your support and understanding during these times of (slightly manic) adjustment and repair.