The boxes aren’t as fat this week for several reasons.  The beautiful head lettuces you have been receiving bolted all at once last week in the long summer sun.  The salad mix was beaten up by torrential rain fall.  The cauliflower had browned and I didn’t feel like it was good enough to put in the boxes.  We are at the end of the broccoli.  The swiss chard was holey and brown from overly wet hot days.  Also there were about three weeks of overly satureated fields.  We could not plant succession crops on time that we would be harvesting right now.  We are also right on the cusp of the main season crops beginning to produce.  There is some fruit but not enough to add to the boxes yet.

People are mistaken if they think farmers are loving all this rain.  Maybe if you have a monocrop that you planted only once this spring, you wouldn’t mind this much rain.  But for farmers who are trying to plant a variety of succession crops each week it has been really hard to keep things going.  After large amounts of rainfall we need several dry days to be able to get the tractors into the fields to prepare beds or cultivate.  Just before the fields were dry enough it would rain again.  We’ve lost crops to the weeds because we could not get in there to pull them without pulling out the veggie plants as wet clay soil clumps together. Plant disease grows and spreads in warm wet fields where the leaves never fully dry and there is constant standing water.

So we are sorry that mother nature has not been more accomodating to our planting plans this season.  And I assure you it is not do to lack of effort on our part.  It’s all part of sharing the risk of farming that you so bravely signed up for. But do not dispare this is not to say that all the boxes will be this way, far from it.  We are just experiencing a lull this week.  There are lots of full boxes of veggies yet to come!  August and September are big months for harvesting.  All of the main season crops that have been doing nothing but silently growing will burst into fruit!  The succession crops that we were late in planting will suddenly mature!  The weed pressure is lessoning as the light level begins to shorten each day.  And the cool loving fall crops will be showing their faces yet again!

Thank you one and all for participating in the realities of farming at the whim of mother nature.  It has it’s ups and downs but by the end of the season you look back and see that it all balances out!