washed out

I know.  I'm harping on the weather again.  Bear with me just one more time, and I promise I'll find another topic of conversation next week...

It started raining 42 days ago.  It hasn't let up since then.  We've seen over 30 inches of rain in that time frame.  For comparison, our area usually gets about 45 inches of rain in one year. 

It might just let up now.  This week looks to be dry, and I pray it stays that way for a while.  But nature felt the need for one last hurrah, and dumped another 5+ inches of rain on the farm Friday and into Saturday.   If you saw me looking white as a sheet early Saturday morning at the market, well, that's why.  For the record, I did manage to find my sense of humor again by mid-morning. 

Surveying the farm on Sunday, and looker closer at many of our crops today, that last 5 inches was the final straw for some.

I thought I'd take you all on a little virtual tour of the farm, after our biblical 40 days and 40 nights of rain. 

Rubber boots are required to even get out the back door...

Welcome to our farm.  I mean bayou.

Summer lettuce takes a lot of water, but not quite that much.  The shade cloth has hardly been necessary this year.  Note the umpteenth planting of drowned-out bean seedlings to the left. 

It's just a few beans, but we haven't been able to plant much of anything else either for the past seven weeks.  Keeping a steady supply of a variety of produce available every week requires having to plant almost every week.  We're going to continue to feel the effects of this all summer long.

We lost the potatoes first.  At least $3000 down the drain.  The onions went next.  We managed to salvage roughly 10% by curing them in the greenhouse, but there just wasn't enough room in there to process the entire crop before most of it rotted.  Another couple thousand dollars in lost crops. 

By the way, we're not the sort of farm that qualifies for any kind of crop insurance.

That's okra I planted before the deluge began.  It hasn't died, but it hasn't grown much either.  What's with all those weeds?  We don't use herbicides.  We can't cultivate when there's standing water over the entire farm.  Our only means of weeding lately has been to rip weeds out by hand.  The okra was liberated this afternoon, but we can't keep up with 3 acres of weeds with that method.

So many plants have drowned, wilted and died in the waterlogged soil.  It's a frustrating summer when you can't even get a jalapeno pepper to grow.

Some of our tomato plants look horrible.  Even the Sungolds, which we grow in the greenhouse, have suffered from too much water.  The water table is so high, I haven't had to irrigate in the greenhouse for about a month.  It's still too much water.

We had set out a second late crop of tomatoes in early June, about half of which washed away or drowned.  We still have tomatoes, and should continue to have some tomatoes.  Just not nearly as many.  I'm astonished that we got any this summer.  Estimated crop loss?  Close to $5000.

An environment better suited for ducks than chickens.

We do not have any creeks on this farm.  There should not be a creek here.

Water-logged cucumbers, peppers, and eggplant.  The regular garden cucumbers are done in.  I think the other cucumbers may hang in there for a bit longer.  Roughly 20% of the pepper and eggplant plants down at the lower end of this field (along the new creek) have drowned and wilted.

This wet weather hit at the worst possible time.  Our peak season is June and July.  We expect to earn close to 50% of our income for the year in just those two months.  I'd tally up our crop losses to date at well over $10K, and that number will continue to grow as the summer wears on. 

We need to start planting fall crops now.  And we desperately need an excellent fall crop this year.  Most of the fields set aside for fall crops look more like an unshaved golf course than a plantable farm field.

I find it much easier to sow fall crops directly into the ground, rather than spending a lot of time messing around with flats of seedlings.  That won't happen this summer.  We'll get those flats sown anyway, while praying that it dries out enough to work up the ground.  I've been telling myself it can't rain forever, but I've been telling myself that for what feels like forever.

Please don't tell me this is better than a drought.  Drought will make a farmer worry.  Excessive rain will ruin you.  I can always irrigate, but I can't pump water out of a swamp.  I've seen some bone dry summers.  I'll take a dry season over this mess, any time.