Hello friends! Yes, it’s been a long time since our last post, and we apologize, it’s been a crazy busy time for us. But with a new year comes new goals and brand new opportunities! One goal is to be better about blog posting! So here goes…
Here’s a quick wrap-up of 2019…
2019 was a bit of a tough weather year for our farm. It was a rainy mess of a growing season in our gardens. And it was a tough season weather-wise for our farm pets.
The rain totals during the Spring and Fall months were outrageous! The Spring season started with a freak snowstorm on April 28th that left 7 inches of snow on all of our budding trees, right before a rainy week in May that brought us 9 inches of rain. This late snowstorm killed all the buds on our magnolia, cherry and pear trees. We didn’t have a single pear or cherry in 2019 and we had 4 magnolia flowers bloom all year. FOUR!
It would rain for 3 or 4 days then stop for 1 or 2, then it would rain for 3 or 4 more days throughout the entire month of May and well into June. The ground was so muddy and saturated that trekking to the gardens was a chore, let alone planting anything. Most of the local farmers in our area couldn’t plant their fields until mid-June, so many that the USDA gave them an extra month, until July 15th, to get their seeds in the ground without being required to claim a total loss on the season. We waited as long as we could but by the end of June we had to try to make it work in the mud, and none of our eggplant plants survived, only a third of our cucumbers survived, we got one crop of lettuce out of the entire Spring, many of our potatoes were underdeveloped and our tomato plants battled blight and root-rot all season long. Oh, let’s not forget that half of our onions rotted in the ground and more than half of our garlic was so water-logged that we couldn’t, in good conscience, include it in our CSA shares.
The rains finally calmed down by the 3rd week of June and then we had 2 or 3 weeks of zero rain, which is extreme, but it actually helped dry out the oversaturated earth, until an intense heatwave arrived during the 2nd week of July. The heat index was in the 100s and still, no rain. It was around this time that our son was born. So we lucked out, being that we live in a farmhouse built in 1852, we don’t have central air, so to spend several days in the A/C of a shiny new hospital in Rockford was a blessing for us. But not for our plants and animals back home. In the heat. We came home to a very sad garden and some very stressed out animals.
The drought conditions lasted into early August. Then the gardens were back up and running again, everything was happy and everything was started to look pretty.
But then by September, the torrential rains were back again. Many towns in our area had declared a state of emergency because of flooding. And our garden was back to drowning. In total, we had 3 floods in our gardens in 2019, 2 in the Spring and another in the Fall. To be honest, if we weren’t so completely smitten with our newborn son, I think we would have felt completely demoralized by the results from this past year’s weather. But we are hopeful and optimistic for 2020. We spent the beginning of the winter months plotting and planning our comeback! And we’re excited!
We’ve made some improvements to our farm because of the weather. And we have also made a plan to remodel our gardens! But more on that in the coming days…
