Tag Archives: drought

9/19/07 Vol. 4 #26

Glorious fall like weather these past few days and we have been reveling in it and getting a lot done.  Mornings have started kind of brisk at least in comparison with the past month, long pants and shirts, Elizabeth has even started the days with a wool hat on!  Slowly the unraveling of the farm proceeds.  The little sliding tunnels have been cleaned out of their long finished tomatoes and melons, the first ten rows of tomatoes in the Big Tops are now gone too.  All of the trellises, landscape fabric mulch and irrigation line out too.  Lisianthus trellis pulled out and drip lines in the old Zinnias pulled up.  Tomorrow we will take the plastic off the Big Tops and cinch the long rolls up like sausages to rest the winter in the valleys between the bows. One week to go now until we are finished marketing for the year and then the final clean up will begin, taking down the last of the tomatoes and the major roll up of the pepper field.  If it will rain a little more and I can get soil worked for next year we will seed it all down to a beautiful winter cover crop to hold it until we pull their starter rope again early next year.  Soon the staff will head off for their winter occupations and Betsy and I will be here all by ourselves enjoying the heart of the fall.

Too much to do the think about all that now and the forecast for the weekend is to be back into the low 90’s, so the reality will come rushing back.  All of the summer cover crops and as many of the finished cash crops as possible have been mowed in anticipation of the fall soil preparation fiesta.  Today I need to go and take soil tests as I am bit late in getting them done.  It has been so dry that it is hard to get the soil probe in the ground which makes taking a hundred or so samples a real pain.  But I can’t wait any longer because I will need the results soon so I can add any amendments they may indicate before I seed all the winter cover crops.  We also need to begin planting flowers for Betsy and leeks for me for next spring.  And all too soon the ranunculus corms from Italy will be here and they will need to go into the ground too.  Guess I better get out there and get to work.

Picture of the Week
The Upper pond completely drained, you can also see the logging clear cut in the background

4/3/08 Vol. 5 #3

The rain has certainly been unexpected and welcome.  Originally forecast for just some drizzly weather it turned into almost three days of off and on rain, almost two inches worth.  Everyone is asking “is the drought over?” and the quick answer is no.  Yes the streams are running well right now and many ponds and reservoirs are full or filling.  I am sure the ground water is in no way recharged and as soon as the leaves come out on the trees and the heat hits it will become evident in reduced stream flows.  The National Weather Service/NOAA is forecasting the next three months to have normal precipitation for our area, better news than before.  I still am apprehensive and we are taking all precautions we can to store water.  The upper pond was still six feet down, the spring that used to feed it has long ago gone dry and there is only maybe five acres of watershed above it so we started filling it this week.  Normally we slowly fill the lower pond by means of a gravity feed, two inch line, that runs 800 feet from the creek at about five gallons a minute.  When the lower pond is full we pump that water uphill to the upper pond using the electric irrigation pump, 24 hours of pumping will nearly empty the lower pond and raise the upper pond by about two feet, something like 50,0000 gallons.  We then have to let the lower pond refill, which can take many days, and then start again.  With the creek running well right now we decided to be more aggressive and pump from the creek into the lower pond at a much higher rate and then relay pump at the same time to the upper pond.  So we borrowed a gasoline powered pump and have it set up on the creek bank hooked into that two inch pipe we already have laid and it is working well.  The gas engine has to be refilled every two hours when it runs out of gas but hopefully with three days of running water we can have both ponds completely full.  96 hours of pumping, another 150,000 gallons of water.

Difficult to get a lot of farm work done this week, a bit damp.  The staff did spend Monday morning in the greenhouse moving up the seedlings for the main planting of tomatoes, from one inch containers to four inch containers so they will have large vigorous root systems when we plant them out in 3 weeks.  About 700 plants of 15 varieties.  Tedious work both in working with the little plants but also making sure not to mix the varieties up and mislabel them.  It’s good practice for when they have to do the same thing with the peppers in a few weeks, 2500 plants of 30 varieties.  Perfect weather to do this kind of work as the plants are not as stressed when it’s overcast.  The sugar snap peas got trellised too.  600 feet of plastic net on metal posts to support the soon to be five foot tall vines.  Otherwise we are doing that early spring clean up of fallen limbs, cutting the last firewood for next winter, and other around the farm odds and ends.

Picture of the Week
The temporary pumping station, this large creek was dry for nearly 6 months last year!

6/18/08 Vol. 5 #14

What a glorious morning, just came back in from my morning perambulation (letting the turkeys out, turning on irrigation, general perusal of the place) and the 50 degree temperature that greeted me was almost shocking.  Thank goodness we are near the longest day of the year (and the first day of summer) because this waking up at 5:00 a.m. is not natural.  I always wake with the light and it is just not right to be up this early in the day!  The change of seasons is truly upon us as we are mowing down the spring vegetable and flower crops and planting more of what will be the late summer crops.  Under the tiller go the beet, carrot, spinach and lettuce beds making room for more zinnias, sunflowers and celosia.  We covered the last bay of the Big Tops last week and the guys built their last tomato trellis of the year.  Today we will plant the last round of tomatoes, the ones for August and September.  We do this planting no-till into a rolled down cover crop of grain rye and this year Austrian winter peas, just like all of the sweet peppers.  When we plant the sweet peppers we are always pushing the front end of using this no-till system because the cover crops are just barely mature enough to kill and the soil is still almost too cool under the insulating layer of mulch.  With the late tomatoes it is just right because the cover is well dead and the soil is warm but not hot.  Most farmers will plant their late tomatoes into white plastic in an attempt to keep the soil and the plants a little cooler, besides my disdain for using plastic mulch, we already have those conditions using the no-till.  Even with these more ideal planting conditions we only plant a limited selection of varieties because tomatoes don’t pollinate well in the hot nights of July and August so we only plant five beds and four varieties, a red, a pink, a yellow and of course Sun Gold cherries.

We really need some rain right now, not only is the pond going down but it is time to seed the summer cover crops.  As I was tilling yesterday the soil is getting very dry making it hard to incorporate the crop residues and difficult to germinate the new seeds.  This is beginning to look like last year where it was almost impossible to get the summer cover crops going.  Now that blueberry picking is almost over we are turning our attentions to catching up on all this planting, trellising and spring crop clean up, hopefully today we will also start the pepper trellising as those poblanos are getting tall and susceptible to being knocked over in a storm.  Friday we will begin the annual red onion harvest another sign of summer as right on cue the onion tops are flopping over, telling us it is time to get them out of the ground too.  As Betsy says, it’s like being a chicken on a hot plate, how fast can you dance?

Picture of the Week
Dan marking the beds, Cov planting celosia in the former spring lettuce beds

7/15/09 Vol. 6 #17

Still reveling in yet another cool July morning, temperatures in the high 50’s and low humidity, what a treat!  We did get a bit of rain on Monday, and I raced around to finish the summer cover crop planting.  A week and a half ago (July 4th weekend) in anticipation of the best chance of rain in weeks I rushed around and seeded an acre of summer covers, as a light rain was falling.  It turned out to be all the rain we would get that day, Arghh!!  Just enough water to get some of them to come up but not all.  Mondays half an inch of rain was hopefully enough to bring the rest up, looks like another chance of rain tomorrow too.

With the drought, the varmits are moving in to take advantage of the juicy plants and fruit.  The squirrels are really out of control in the tomatoes and in some of the transplants for late summer production.  Something, squirrels we think, got up onto the benches where we had lettuce and Brussels sprouts transplants in the seed flats and ate the tops off of all the Brussels sprout plants and much of the lettuce too.  So the hunt continues with daily afternoon rounds, so far the tally is four groundhogs and five squirrels.

Everybody is beginning to ask when we will have peppers and begin roasting at market.  Well the easy answer is the roasting will begin, as usual, the end of August when we have an abundance of colored bell peppers.  The answer to when we will have a good supply of peppers at market is harder.  We have been working in the pepper field this week and the plants look amazing, maybe a good as any crop we have ever grown, but for some reason almost all of the early blossoms made no fruit.  Some times it is a result of high temperatures and resulting bad pollination but we have just not been that hot, my best guess is the heavy pounding rains a month ago actually knocked the blooms off the plants.  That being the case it will be late this month before we have many green bells and the same for anaheims and poblanos.  The good news is that with such vigorous plants we should have more, better quality, fruit later in the summer than usual.

There are a number of Peregrine Farm related dinners coming up in the next month that you might be interested in.  The first is next Tuesday, the 21st, at 18 Seaboard in Raleigh.  A tomato focused event, Jason is coming up with dishes around each of the varieties we grow.  The second is our annual Panzanella farm dinner on the 27th, it looks to be equally divided between tomato dishes and pepper dishes, it is always fun.

The last two are cooking classes at A Southern Season the first is a lunch class on the 28th with Marilyn Markel who runs the cooking school and the second is an evening class on August 6th with Ricky Moore of Glass Half Full, again focused on tomatoes.
Picture of the Week
A beautiful field of peppers, some plants shoulder high

8/12/09 Vol. 6 #20

We’re back!  Almost all of us anyway, Betsy is still in Colombia (South America, everyone looks at me and says “South Carolina?”) until tomorrow and hopefully will be rested as she will have to hit the ground running on Friday to prepare for Saturday market.  A fairly typical break for the rest of us think.  I did get in a few days of hiking and camping up in the mountains before Betsy flew away.  Since then I have been puttering around the farm doing some small projects, reading, sleeping, eating and trying to keep things watered.

This drought is getting serious now.  The forecast for the end of the week is for several days with a chance of rain above 50 percent but I am not holding out much hope.  In the last two months we have had a scant two inches of rain.  All of the rains have gone either north or south of us.  The big creek is dry and we have been pulling water out of the upper, back up, pond for some weeks now.  The last few days of near 100 degree temperatures have applied a brush stroke across the farm of brown crinkly grass and weeds, the true colors of a drought that has been masked until now by the cooler temperatures of this unusual summer.

Fortunately we do have enough water to get us through the end of this season, mostly because we only have about seven weeks left and there are only so many crops left to water.  The little bit of fall planting we do has been going in on schedule, has been watered up with irrigation, and generally looks good.  More radishes seeded yesterday and some Swiss chard too.  The biggest potential loss is our summer cover crops, seeded six weeks ago they should be waist high by now but are at best ankle high, as our main source of organic matter to improve our soils this is never a good situation.  Hey it could rain a lot this week and things will take off, lets hope!

Picture of the Week
Cowpea and Sudangrass cover crop, looks good where there is small irrigation leak