Can't Fight Mother Nature

Sorry for not updating for a while but with the weather and various problems caused by it, time got away from us. As many of you know we ended up losing the vast majority of our strawberry crop. We are absolutely devastated by it and have never experienced anything like it. We are not entirely certain what happened. We already knew that we had essentially lost one field of strawberries to winter damage from the exceptionally cold winter, but even at the beginning of June the rest of the fields looked on course for a normal year. Then mother nature had her say. Between heat, heavy rains, and high winds we went from having a ton of blossoms and baby berries, to essentially having only one partial field with anything in it. All we can say is it was the perfect storm of bad weather at bad timing for the field and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.

Similarly it was not a great weather year for vegetables and quite a few of our vegetables had to be replanted as the first plantings were either washed away in the weather or killed by the high heats. Eventually something came up in every field, but many things will be delayed this year. The beans had to be planted three times, but eventually one planting took and has quite a few blossoms on it, but unfortunately the deer have begun snacking on them so that is likely to be a limited crop for us this year. Pumpkins had to be planted twice and upick may run late on those but the plants are looking very happy and healthy now. Corn, happily, was planted on schedule and is beginning to tassel and show silks so should be ready in a couple of weeks.

We picked our first few tomatoes yesterday and are just waiting for more to ripen before we can open them. The Roma/sauce tomatoes are absolutely loaded with green tomatoes so we are just praying they can stay disease free this year for a nice bountiful harvest. Peppers and eggplant have very nice looking plants but with the heat they have been delaying blossoming so they likely will not be ready until August, though we are hoping the cooler weather this week will entice them to set fruit! We planted potatoes quite late this year but have been rewarded with some of the best looking plants we have seen in years!

On the bright side of the farm this year, the blueberries are absolutely loaded and picking is currently excellent! We are still picking our main field, but our late field will be ready as well in a week or two and is typically open for picking into September. The fall raspberries are on schedule for their usual August opening, although the Black Raspberries do look like they will be ready before the Red Raspberries.

Overall this year has been particularly tough on us but we are doing our best to persevere and putting all of our efforts into our remaining crops and into next years strawberries! We are trying to remain optimistic because as they say you can't be a farmer without being eternally optimistic for your future crop!