June 23, 2008
The dry season should be looming. As the weather heats up, new farmers scramble to make sure they have a watering system in place in preparation for the summer, the time of year when the crops come on fast and furious but demand a tremendous amount of water given the beating sun and long hours of daylight. We’ve had our drip lines set up for irrigation for close to a month now, flat black plastic tubing dotted with tiny holes which permit water to drip right onto the roots of the plants, a much more water efficient way to irrigate than sprinklers, which water beds and pathways indiscriminately. But our drip has been off for the past few weeks due to unusually wet weather.
In many ways, the heavy rains that have settled into the Pioneer Valley in recent weeks are a blessing. Surrounding a wretched heat wave, the storms have prevented the plants from becoming parched or stunted and the soil from becoming dust under our boots. But holds on our plans to get into the fields during this busy time of year have arisen as a result of this unseasonably wet weather.
There are few jobs in this day and age that revolve around the weather. Sure, the schoolteacher in the colder parts of the country gets an occasional snowday. And I suppose the opposite is true, that plow drivers kick into high gear during snow season. But for the most part, careers and work schedules are unaffected by temperature and precipitations. Farming is not such a profession.
The ground is soaking wet. Pick up a handful of soil today and it will form, almost without coaxing, a dense ball of mud. This means that many of the farm tasks that demand attention between the set days of harvests and markets cannot be done. Hoeing, for example, comes to a standstill when the ground is wet. Try running a scuffle hoe through muddy soil, and you’ll have little luck cutting and upturning the lambs quarter and pursulane growing among the crops. But more importantly, try to do any sort of weed-controlling farm work when the ground is wet and you’ll create a worse weed problem. You see, the concept of handweeding and hoeing is threefold- to aerate the soil, to remove the weeds from around the crops, and to upturn their roots so the sun shrivels them up and prevents the little buggers from re-rooting in the beds. But when there’s excessive moisture in the dirt, little uprooted weeds lying on the soil have a good chance of wheedling their way back into the ground before the soil dries out.
I was reminded this week of how rain is just one more factor that makes farming an unusual occupation. Farmers have to work around the weather, often working longer days when the weather is prime, and impatiently (although sometimes gratefully, for the unexpected day of rest) waiting until the soil dries out enough to let the hoes, plows, and tillers to get back in action.
A mixed summer blessing, this rain seems to be. Mother nature is flexing her annual muscle, proving to farmers that there will always be climatic constraints to how fast and how efficiently they can work, and reminding them that setting a fixed schedule is merely a silly notion (clearly created by the non-farming majority). In a few weeks, we may be crying out for rain amid a drought or heat wave. But for now, our agendas have been thwarted. It must’ve been farmers who coined that famous “The best laid plans…” quote.
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