I realized that I have not always done a good job of communicating some of the problems on the farm this season. I think I wanted to avoid whining every week about the weather. So now I am going to catch you all up on the problems of this season.

The biggest issue is no surprise to anyone. It has been hot and dry. For a while we were holding our own with the heat because we were getting enough rain. But once the rain stopped, the plants began to suffer.

Now, I do have irrigation on the farm. During July, it takes a week and a half to get through the whole farm with the water running 24/7. (And you should see the resulting electric bill!) Even with all of this there is not enough water for everything. So this year, I had to make some choices and I stopped watering some crops that did not germinate well. So most of our crops that are transplanted (tomatoes, peppers, squash, broccoli, lettuce, etc.) have done ok. But the directly seeded crops have not. We won’t have any carrots and beets this year. We lost several plantings of chard, salad mix and green beans. I did manage to save one of the bean plantings. Our final planting of green beans will have a decent harvest.

Another problem we have had to deal with is sunshine. We have had a lot of cloudless, sunny days. Believe it or not, some plants suffer from sunburn. (In the plant world, they call it sunscald). Peppers and tomatoes are very susceptible. The sunscald starts out as tan spots that quickly turn black and look horrible. This week I picked 6 5-gallon buckets of peppers. Two of the buckets were too damaged to be put into your boxes. So the intensity of the sun has cut down on our harvest.

Then there are the things I can’t explain. I have the same amount of cherry tomatoes that I planted last year. But I’m getting half the harvest. I doubled the size of the cucumber patch, but I’m still not getting enough. It’s a mystery.

There is some good news. Potatoes are coming. The last five years have seen our potato harvest shrink, as the beetles have gotten stronger. So this year I tried a new strategy. Instead of planting potatoes early in the spring, I waited until the end of June. That way the beetles’ life cycle was over. We have some nice plants growing in the field. The harvest is a few weeks away. I never know how good the harvest will be until we dig it up, but the plants are there and are not beetle chewed.

We should have a good harvest of sweet potatoes. Winter squash looks great. Tomatoes are producing well. Each year is unique. Some crops do well some years and not in other years. It is the ebb and flow of the seasons. Let us hope the rain continues and the crops do well.