I’m not complaining about the rain

We need rain here in the mountains.  We are still in a drought and have been for the past couple of years which makes me not want to complain one bit about the snow and rain the past few weeks; however, we FINALLY had a couple days of sunshine, just the right amount giving our soil a chance to dry, which allowed us to plant potatoes and transplant a few greens to the field.

Our plants have been begging to be freed from the greenhouse for the last couple weeks, but we the parents didn’t feel good putting them outdoors just before a recent snow storm, so we held them in the greenhouse incubator waiting for better weather.  Then the snow melted and the rain came for over a week.  Meanwhile, our baby seedlings in the greenhouse kept growing and I began worrying that if we don’t get our plants out into the fields we won’t have enough food for our first CSA delivery May 23^rd.

RELIEF. Friday we were able to transplant our babies out to the fields in between snow storms and rain showers.  Needless to say, by this first opportunity to transplant, many of our seedlings grew into teenagers and were huge, which requires us to hand transplant because the plants were too big for our transplanter.  Those seedlings small enough to go through the transplanter went into the ground beautifully!  Now I am hoping for rain once again to give our transplants a good soaking without us having to set up irrigation. 

We humans are funny – not wanting rain then wanting rain – it is just one more thing that us humans will probably want to control. (I must admit there are times when I would love to have a button to turn on/off the rain.)  I hope the world never comes to that.   Humans controlling rain.

The other worrisome thing is that while out in the fields transplanting we noticed that our direct seeded crops didn’t fare so well during this little bit of weather.  The flea beetles completely devoured or first direct seeded crops and because of the rain we are behind on direct seeding our next succession.  I think we will still be ok as far as food for the CSA but we won’t actually know until a couple weeks into May.  One would think that I have enough farming experience at this point in time to know if we will have enough food for our first delivery.  But I don’t.  I’m still learning and wonder will I ever be able to forecast our harvest accurately?  Is an experienced farmer able to forecast their harvest?