Kitchen Garden Journal

Tropical Storm Irene delivered some pretty serious weather over the weekend and the verdict is: it could have been a lot worse. Compared to what we imagined, and compared to the raging rivers to our west, our suffering is minimal.

Yes, our fields are flooded about as bad as they get, and that was pretty much the death knell for tomato season. But our greenhouses and buildings are all fine.

The bigger story here, though, is that Irene is just the latest in a pretty much never ending stream of weather-related difficulties we have experienced this year. We just haven’t been able to catch a lucky break since the first seeds went in the ground back in April, or even before, when the snow just wouldn’t melt. 

This has been a hard year, especially for getting our fall crops in and established in the extremely hot and dry July followed by a very wet August. Our main crop of fall carrots failed to germinate, our beets are now mostly under water, and our potatoes are pretty much nonexistent due to flooding back in May and June. It looks like we’ll have some decent broccoli, but this is truly going to be the leanest fall season since we started this operation. Which is a bummer, for sure.

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A farmer griping about the weather is a cliché for sure. I try not to dwell too much on the weather on this blog, but today I can't help myself.

Without a doubt, this year's cycle of winter giving birth to spring has been a drawn-out and difficult labor. But last week, the Pioneer Valley got its natural disaster bona-fides after tornadoes ripped through Hampden County.

And after reading the article on the front page of today’s New York Times about how global warming is affecting agriculture, yes, I feel compelled to offer a few thoughts on the weather.

My own thoughts, assumptions, and observations about global warming were eerily mirrored in the article. I often quip that New England farmers may be among the few beneficiaries of global warming. Our growing season is short, our winters are long. What could be bad about a few extra degrees? But the truth, of course, is hardly that simple.

Climate experts also thought agriculture might benefit from global warming because plants would have access to additional CO2, a primary fuel for their growth. However, these scientists have now found that erratic and extreme weather caused by warming counteracts any gains. I and many other farmers are nodding our heads in agreement.

Just over the past two or three seasons we have had floods, droughts, extreme winds, crazy snow and ice, new and terrible diseases, and a host of other plagues, it seems. It used to be said that if you didn’t like the weather in New England, you just had to wait a moment and it would change. Last summer we had a month without a drop of rain and already this spring we had ten straight days with no sun. It seems that these days the weather is no less variable, but we are waiting longer for it to change.

Of course, our weather problems—annoying and damaging though they be—are mild compared with the floods, droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes (and earthquakes, which are not connected to global warming) going on elsewhere in the country and the world. No matter how bad it gets around here, someone else somewhere has it ten times worse.

And that is worrisome for farmers and people who eat food wherever they are. A passage from the Times article posed the challenge we collectively face in these blunt terms:

"… in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. And they need to do it while reducing the considerable environmental damage caused by the business of agriculture."

But despite the dread that rises in me when I read these words, I take heart that my small farm may hold some keys to solving this problem on a local, national and even global scale. Climate shocks notwithstanding, we’re already doing our part on these issues.

We produce far more food per acre on our farm than the monocultures surrounding us. We produce an array of diverse crops on a small piece of land, and while we may not be harvesting record-breaking yields for particular crops, we are producing them without doing lasting harm to the land or the surrounding environment. What we grow is consumed fresh by people living in our community, not shipped halfway around the world or processed into Doritos.

When I think about the challenges facing agriculture I am proud of what we do here at The Kitchen Garden. And I believe that if farms around the world start getting smaller, more diverse and more rooted in their communities, we’ll all have an easier time riding out the storm.

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The recent break from the never-ending heat wave of 2010 (is it really finally over?) has us thinking about winter. Summer is barely over and yet all our thoughts are trained on that cold horizon: how much time do we have left before the end? Time is marching quickly toward vegetative slowdown and dormancy, so we have to make sure we can get the most out of the rest of the growing season.

We’ve pulled out the tomatoes, ripped up the mulch and drip lines, and tilled in a covering of rye. There’s really no rush for rye yet, though. You can plant it until the middle of October, but it does more of its good work (stabilizing the soil, absorbing nutrients and creating organic matter) the earlier you get it sown.

This week the last of the quick-maturing salad crops will be seeded in the field, but the greenhouses are empty. Our summer crop of cucumbers is long finished and our seedlings have vacated, so we can think about planting some extra late crops indoors for November harvests.  (Both of the Farmers Markets we attend have extended their season until just before Thanksgiving this year.) The warmth and shelter from wind created by the plastic covering gives us about one extra month of prime growing weather.

We are also doing some experimental plots of super late planted crops that will be wintered-over in the field. This has us thinking not just of the coming winter, but even to next spring. We’d like to have spinach, scallions, carrots and lettuce for the first market of next spring around May 1. So we’ll get the plants to about 4-6 weeks old and then cover them with fabric and sheets of plastic to hold them in suspended animation through the winter. They will begin growing again at the end of February, when the sun starts to shine again and well before we can think of tilling or planting anything new.  

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. It’s September right now and it’s beautiful: big skies, clean air, and the feeling of a fresh start. Let’s try to enjoy it, along with the last of summer’s bounty, while it lasts.

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Wow. It's hot. There are weeds everywhere. It must be July.

This year the weather seems determined to distinguish itself against that of last year. Mostly, this makes me happy. The two past seasons were rainy and cold. I was hoping for a hot, dry one this year, and it looks like I'm going to get it. While the tomatoes are absolutely healthy and gorgeous and laden with green fruit, and the squash and cukes and peppers and okra are growing rapidly, it's seriously dry out there. And just as cool wet weather creates problems in the garden, too much heat and dryness comes with other risks. 

So we are finally getting to use our irrigation system, but we have to make choices. Scheduled plantings can't be delayed, so we're watering our baby transplants. Our onions need water in order to make large bulbs at this crucial moment, so we'll try to get some on those. Tomatoes, cukes, and squash are easily watered through their drip feed lines. But what if the potatoes need water? There are just too many of them, so they'll have to wait for the rain.

Perhaps the best part about this dry spell (apart from hopefully ripening our tomatoes extra-early) is that this is the time of the garlic harvest (see photo above of our nicely ripening garlic crop), and dry weather makes it very easy to begin the curing process without the risk of molds and mildew developing. Of course, the garlic probably would be bigger in a wetter year, but we'll take what we can get. In this business, that's all you can hope for.

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Jack Frost may soon be nipping at our basil and peppers, but we say, "Bring it on." Fall is an amazingly abundant time of year, and we have no less variety in this season than we had at the height of summer. In the autumn, a whole new cast of characters take the stage. Leeks, celeriac, turnips and radishes, cauliflower and broccoli, cabbages, carrots and beets, sweet potatoes and squashes. There are so many things to cook that are inspiring us right now, most of which would be unpalatable during the warmer times just weeks ago. Soups, stews, roasts, gratins, purées.... Once you embrace the cool season, you don't even miss the tomatoes.

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Summer came and went in about 2 weeks this year. If it hadn't been so dreadfully humid, we might not have even noticed.

At the end of summer, you can tell what summer was like by looking at the heat-loving crops. This year, it's enough to make you go into a deep back-to-school depression.  The tomatoes are done for. The peppers are weak and diseased. The eggplant is virtually non-existent. And the poor okra--it never really got a chance and it's barely hanging on.

Looking at the devastation, it's not hard to tell that we had an abysmal summer, weather-wise. It never warmed up, we got dumped on all season, diseases went rampant. We made the best of it, and we still managed to eat well. But our summer yields were a fraction of what we'd reasonably hope for in a normal year, if such a thing exists anymore.  All the more reason to grasp for the last sweet handfuls of the summer fruits, while we still can.  

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This past week was another big one.  We did a a major planting of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, fennel, beets, turnips, and lettuce.  We harvested a barnful of onions, a pretty strenuous and smelly job at times.  We hauled in the peak of our tomato crop, which despite all the bad weather we've had, looked beautiful.  And we even managed to hand-weed the entire planting of fall carrots and beets.

It's amazing what a week of fine weather can do for our spirits after being so beaten down by the rain for so long.  (I've heard figures suggesting we had 17 inches of rain in July, over 3 times the monthly average!)  For the first time I can remember since maybe May, we're going into a new week feeling fairly well caught-up.  We even used our irrigation system to water in all of those seedlings we set out.  It's kind of nice to feel like we're in control of things again.
Sure, we've suffered soome losses due to the rain.  Our entire crop of winter squash and melons were wiped out.  We've had reduced yields of tomatoes, summer squashes lost to disease, cucumbers repeatedly pummelled to death by heavy rains, onions rotting in the field, and potatoes juicier than we like.  But all in all, it has been a really productive and abundant year so far.  It certainly could have been a lot worse.

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You have probably heard the reports going around about the tomato blight: entire crops decimated in a matter of days, farmers mowing down their tomato patches or discarding infected plants in trash bags.  Phytophthora, or late blight, is the fungus that caused the Irish Potato Famine, and it has been wreaking havoc throughout the northeast this summer.  It spreads its spores on the wind, so infected fields pose a danger to neighboring crops.  Hence all the fuss.    

For the moment, our crop is relatively free of this deadly fungus (see photo), but that could change rapidly.  We do have pretty bad alternaria, or early blight, but that is something we expect. It's just worse in a wet year like this one, but it doesn't kill the plants as rapidly.  We have decided not to spray any fungicides on our tomatoes.  We think it's pretty gross, and anyway, at this point any efforts to spray would be too little, too late.  (The proper way to use fungicides is to begin applying them at planting and spray before every rain.  Since we have not done this, there is little reason to start now.)  So, for now, enjoy your tomatoes.  Precious sweet as they are already, this year every bite of tomato is a reminder of what mother nature can take away.   

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 After a restless night listening to the pounding rain, we awoke Friday morning to the most flooded field we had ever seen.  We rubbed our eyes and stared.  Yep, it was real.  The middle section of our field was completely submerged.  Plants that we had set out on Monday were totally invisible under 2 inches of water.

Luckily it stopped raining by 6am when we began our usual Friday harvest.  But the sheer amount of moisture created some interesting situations: sinking up to our ankles in the mud, harvest buckets floating away, and the muddiest carrots I've ever seen.  Carrots whose tops snapped off could be retrieved simply by reaching down into the liquid soil. 
At this point, the rain is so bizzare that it's hard to think rationally about what it means.  But basically every single crop that we are growing will not tolerate much more of this, and if we don't get some sun to dry us out, we may start to experience significant losses.  We are seeing evidence of neighboring farms plowing under entire crops of tobacco, squash, tomatoes and potatoes that have been infected with a deadly fungus.  For now, we remain hopeful, and frankly, astonished and thankful for the fabulous crops we've been able to harvest despite the ridiculous weather situation.    

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What a deluge! A week or so ago, we needed rain.  The first storm we got was necessary; the second, the third, the fourth...well, not so much.  We started reaching the too much rain point a while ago, and it just kept coming, inch after soggy inch.  

Of course, the plants need rain to grow.  But none of the vegetables we grow, with the possible exception of celery and parsley and mint, can tolerate the kind of saturation of the soil that we've seen recently.  When so much rain comes all at once, the soil acts like a saturated sponge: it just can't absorb it all and the water just sits there.  It washes away all the fertility in the soil.  It's like if you were allowed only water and no food for a week.  You wouldn't be too happy.  

Worst of all, some areas of our farm are low and wet to begin with.  We had a fairly dry spring and were able to get one such area planted with squashes, cucumbers and melons.  With such an incredible amount of rain in such a short period, we may begin to have some losses.  Last year was a crazy, crazy wet year.  We were hoping it was a fluke.  Maybe not.

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