Like most farmers in California, we’ve missed a lot of deadlines here at Terra Firma this spring. And we’re still missing them. Because we’re at least a month behind in much of our spring work. And it’s not like we have any extra time built into our normal spring schedule to play catch-up. It’s always a crazy busy stressful time of year.
But we are getting our first real dry stretch in a month, and we are taking full advantage of it. In the last five days we have planted tomatoes, corn, green beans, spinach, arugula, watermelons, melons, summer squash and cucumbers.
Meanwhile, the tomatoes we planted back on the first of March haven’t seemed to suffer much in all the wet weather. They’re big enough that we are putting the stakes in this week to start trellising them. Having said that, I can’t help but point out that by April 25th in 2015, we were already harvesting tomatoes. But that was a crazy year. This year, I’ll be pleasantly surprised if we are picking tomatoes a month from now. It will depend entirely on the weather from here on out.
One big positive is that we have not had to irrigate hardly anything so far. The ground in most of our fields is still fully saturated, just barely dry enough to plant and do all the other work we need to do. So our irrigation staff has been re-purposed into other tasks that need doing. Which is good. We need all the help we can get.
Thanks,
Pablito