Here we are at the second day of summer. I thought that the commanding factor in our summer would continue to be coronavirus. But the weather has once again made a fool out of me. Summer broke at the end of May , after snowing on us and remaining too cold to embark on early planting. It turned hot and dry and continues this pattern to the moment. In fact,excessively hot, and now excessively dry. The flow of the Connecticut River speaks to mid August drought conditions and not the first half of June, and the water tables are diminishing as illustrated by the brooks and vernal streams that are disappearing. The heat is very dry with air movement, which bodes well for someone owning a camp on the coast or on a pond, but is very tough on trying to keep the vegetable plants coming along.
To offset what nature is denying us, we have to irrigate. Its very expensive to deliver necessary water to the plants. There is drip irrigation which is very efficient in its delivery, and we utilize it wherever possible, usually under the row mulch in the fields. It also utilizes a lot of plastic , much of which gets annually land filled. Over head irrigation is very inefficient due to the loss from evapo-transpiration., but very necessary in certain instances like small transplants and the strawberry plants and fruit that suffer mightily as the temps rise above the mid 80’s. Then there is just the additional problem of labor management. You hire a crew to plant and harvest with a certain degree of irrigation expected, but in a year like this 20% of the crews labor gets redirected towards trying to save the crop. Irrigation is fossil fuel, specialized machinery, and additional labor. It chews into the bottom line pretty hard.
The heat, especially when its in the 90s just wears the crew down. We are into our strawberry season. The heat brings the fruit on fast, and the demand is there so the time spent picking strawberries is excessive. Ray and the guys picked over three tons in three days this past weekend. The heat was tough. That’s a lot of tonnage when its harvested one berry at a time. Hopefully the weather pattern will break in the near future, for both the vegetable crops and the help.
Pandemic protocols are a nuisance and inconvenience for both sales force, customers and laborers. Things have evolved from being told that we couldn’t open anything at all here in early April except curbside to a completely different model that evolves daily. I like to think that by wearing it I get some protection, but moreover people recognize it as me just trying to be respectful and courteous. Most of the customers have been agreeable, with only a handful trying to make a political statement by showing up without one and complaining. The masks were certainly more comfortable back in March and April when it wasn’t 90 degrees. The farmstand crew has just been outstanding in compliance and understanding the many sides of the issue, and things have gone smoothly there. In order to deal with potential problems with required social distancing, we decided to restrict children under 12 in the PYO strawberry beds, and we received some blowback over that. I am sympathetic to the fact people want to bring their children, it’s what we have done in the past. But we are trying to make everybody a bit safer by going by recommended guidelines and what we have learned from extension educators, state health officials and the FDA about how this thing can potentially spread, and we have decided this is the appropriate thing to do until the vaccine is developed or we learn otherwise. We fully understand that a financial hit will be incurred, but again, we mutually feel it is appropriate.
The next time I blog will likely be after the conclusion of our strawberry season, I hope it will be after we have gotten some good rain so my covid neck mask will be used more for the purposes of restricting covid from entering my lungs and not the current primary purpose of keeping my lungs from filling up with field dust while working on a tractor.
Its strawberry season…tomatoes are close behind!
Looks Cool. Costs a fortune. Doesn’t do nearly as good a job as Mother Nature….