Yes! It is raining this morning. Who knows how much we'll actually get, but we're cautiously hopeful. Just getting the leaves wet seems like a good thing at this point. We have been irrigating like mad this past month. If we aren't harvesting we're irrigating. The ground has been too dry to do any field work. The pond that we dug the first year that we moved here holds 1.2 million gallons of water. We started irrigating about a month ago and it is about half gone, so we've pumped out about 600,000 gallons. We've got about another month of irrigation in there. The pond irrigates the north half of the farm, the south half is irrigated off of a well. The well can run about 16 200 foot lines at a time while maintaining about 8psi. That well runs 24/7 these days, and every 12 hours or so we switch the lines. It takes about 2 weeks to get around the whole field. Holding a dripping irrigation line in a hot dusty field really brings home how precious water is to growing food. Over all we're doing ok though. I farmed alone in Homer in 1999 and that year it was so dry that the leaves on the trees started to wither and turn brown in August. That was dry!! All the tree leaves out there still look fine. I also didn't have any irrigation on that farm. Talk about a stressed young farmer. I was only 21. Yes it's dry this year, but we have 3 sources of irrigation, and a full crew. Overall I feel blessed to have a job that completely binds me to the weather. It is grounding and humbling to have that much reality imposed on you every day.
I wrote that yesterday morning. We didn't get any more rain yesterday, but a BIG storm woke Paul and I last night. An inch!! Hallelujah! We are doing good today.
Veggies:
tomatoes!!, basil, spinach, salad mix, head lettuce, European cucumbers, field cucumbers, summer squash, daikon, hakurei, kale, collards, chard, escarole, endive
U-Pick: unlimited
all flowers on the farm EXCEPT the lillies.
basil
chard
kale
Alright,
See you at the farm!
Evangeline
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