Rain rain, go away...

This time last year we were irrigating our spring crops. This year, we are waiting to get into the fields! It has rained 3.4 inches so far this month, according to Accuweather. They are forecasting another 4 inches this month! Every day, but one, this month they recorded at least a trace of rain, and at least some is expected every day for the next 10 days! That is 40 days people!

Let me tell you, if we have over 7" of rain in April, it will take a solid week (at least) of warm, windy and DRY days before we can get on ANY of our land. We currently have a greenhouse full of starts, a few hundred feet of peas, 1600+ feet of potatoes, and our garlic in the ground. That is it.

We have room in our back high tunnel for more lettuce, greens, scallions, radishes, and some other items like those, but in general we need it to STOP raining. We have 500 pounds of potatoes , 3 cases of onion starts (1800 plants each), 50 pounds of onion sets (6000 or so sets), and that is not to mention the starts!

Thankfully, I am not worried about our CSA, with a mid-June start week we should be fine (assuming it stops raining at some point! We will keep starting plants, and soon will start potting huge amounts up into bigger containers. That way items we would like to be planting soon (like the cabbages), will be able to keep growing. This will make it a bit harder when it comes time to plant them in the field, but they will be big healthy plants! We will probably max out our greenhouse soon if we pot plants up. One tray of 72 cabbage starts becomes 5 or 6 trays of 4 inch pots. You can imagine this type of exponential growth is hard to manage in confined areas, so we will need to look at alternatives, like some quick fabricated low tunnels.

All and all, a wet season is better then a droughty one for us. We just want to be able to get plants in the ground. So please just hope that we do not see 40 days and 40 nights of rain in May...