Last week, were ready to be all chin up about the weather. This week, we’re ready to whine. We had rain again on Friday morning, and Monday morning dawned – despite all of our plans otherwise – with a four-inch thunderstorm, which once again set off a tremendous rush of water throughout the farm. We haven’t been in the field for three weeks now. Another inch fell on Tuesday night. Small streams are running everywhere on the farm, and around the area, in places we’ve never seen them run before. The seasonal stream that runs through our farmyard has been flowing for a straight ten days now, and not with a trickle, either; on Monday morning, the stream was too deep and wide for the kids to walk through it to get to the bus.
The excessive water has actually done quite a bit of damage on the farm. The driveway has gotten so bad that we will need an SUV to get in out if we get any more rain. We’ve had mud running through the packing shed and two of our greenhouses for about a week now. Soil erosion on the farm is pretty bad, as we had a lot of ground open in preparation for planting our winter cover crops. About half of our carrot crop has rotted in the ground or sat under water for so long that the carrots have died.
The sun came out on Wednesday, and everybody spent a lot of time pointing at the funny bright thing in the sky.
Zane and Olive went back to school. Isabel starts next week. Zane finished 22nd out of a field of more than 100 cross country runners in
Kim took time out from farmers market on Saturday to run the Rochester Half Marathon, which she finished in !:53. Way to go, Kim!
On Sunday, Chris and Kim celebrated their twelfth wedding anniversary at the Minnesota State Fair, where we sampled out a Cipollini onion spread as part of the Wedge’s effort to promote local food and farming. We took the excuse to have a whole day off the farm, and enjoyed breakfast together at the Highland Grill and sushi for dinner at Saji Ya. We even got to meet R. T. Rybeck while we were sampling onions - he thought they were great!
Workwise, we’ve really focused on the indoor activities that we can get done now, so that when it does finally dry out – we’re thinking Sunday might be our day! - we can go hog wild out in the field. In the last two weeks, we’ve cleaned a lot of onions, caught up on office work (if you’re ever really caught up on that), and prepped our greenhouse tomato and cucumber crops for removal in late September. Unfortunately, muddy harvests have taken up a a tremendous amount of our limited staff time, since harvesting in the mud is similar to picking with lead shoes.
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