Most of the crew took last Friday off, the fields too wet for work until the late afternoon. Ben and Sarah took advantage of the time to do some Quadrant Two activities (from Stephen Covey, that important-but-not-urgent stuff), organizing old packing records and fixing the sorts of small irritants that can ruin day. In the afternoon, the soil had dried out enough to do a limited amount of work, and Ben seeded more lettuce and dill while Chris got the cultivating tractor out to try to get caught up on the weeds until it was too dark to see (and he was too hungry to drive straight).
Saturday was devoted to killing more weeds in the intense sunlight and steady breeze that encourages even the fleshy weeds like purslane to give up the ghost. An inch of rain on Saturday night gave Chris permission to rest on Sunday, which was much-appreciated.
More rain fell on Monday night, in a narrow band that spared Highlandville, three miles south, but left a half-inch in the farm’s rain gauge. Spring Grove, just a few miles north, got an inch-and-a-half, so we felt pretty lucky. By Wednesday, we were able to do handwork in the field, and mow down the remains from the lettuce and escarole harvests, and handweed the parsley and celeriac, but it was still too wet to do any tillage or mechanical weeding.
The garlic continues to dry down in the fancy onion setup we described last week, and we expect to take it out for storage in the next day or two. Especially given the humid weather and the rain, this whole forced-warm-air business seems well worth the trouble and the energy expenditure. In the greenhouses, tomatoes continue their rampant growth.
Thursday has dawned with the sort of heavy rain that provides a sickening reminder of the opening salvos of the floods of 2007 and 2008, although the forecast doesn’t look like we are heading in that direction. The weather radar shows an ugly, swirling signature taking the rain in Northeast Iowa and sending it up the
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