We’re planting strawberries this week at Terra Firma, the most time-consuming and labor-intensive planting task we do most years here.  Once the field is prepared, we lay plastic mulch over it with drip tape beneath it.  Then we irrigate the field for several days so the soil is soft and moist.  Just before planting, we use a tractor implement with spiked wheels that rolls on top of the bed, punching two rows of 2 inch holes every 12 inches and making a deep indentation in the soil.  Our crew follows behind, pushing the strawberry plants —  each one a bundle of bare roots with just a tiny rosette on top where the leaves will push out — into the holes and then gently tucking the soil in around them.  The plants have to be at exactly the right depth:  if the roots are exposed to air after planting, they will die.  If the bud of the plant is buried, it will also die.

Most strawberries in California are planted the same way — there does not exist yet an army of robots or a specialized machine to do the task.  We plant just 3 acres or so of berries each year here — a tiny amount compared to the tens of thousands of acres planted in Watsonville, Oxnard, Santa Maria and other major growing regions.  And yet it takes the majority of our crew most of a week to get it done.  To do an acre in a day would take 18 people.

Our berries are getting planted late this year — the latest we’ve ever done it.  I like to plant them the week of Labor Day, but it was too hot last week to do it.  The weather was better the last week of August, but the field wasn’t quite ready yet.  Even Monday of this week was too hot, so we started yesterday.  Today the weather is absolutely perfect and the forecast for the next week looks great.

We’ve learned our lesson with strawberries that planting when it’s 100 degrees or more is a bad idea.  The plants we are using have been stored for months in the freezer, and the delicate shoots that emerge from the roots are extremely sensitive to the hot sun.  They can easily die before they even get growing.  All it takes is a 3-5 days of less-hot weather for them to get acclimated.  If it gets hot once the leaves have emerged and grown a few inches, they will be fine.

Strawberries are not the only crop we plant this time of year that is dramatically effected by extreme heat.  Carrot and lettuce seed will both cook in the soil during heatwaves.  Celery plants are extremely sensitive to heat right after they are planted.  And just about any emerging seedling can be killed if it gets much over 105 before it develops leaves.  The green beans that we normally would have harvested last week and this week died that way during the heat of mid-July.

We’re still tallying up the damage of the month-long July heatwave.  In addition to the green beans, we also lost two plantings of Carrots that we would normally harvest in October into November.  Many of our Potatoes got cooked in the soil.  It also caused both our tomato and watermelon fields to stop fruiting.  Those effects had a long lag time, but we are now experiencing them fully as the fields we should be harvesting right now have little or nothing to pick.

Not all the effects of the extreme heat were bad — it appears to have drawn out our Peach and Nectarine season by slowing down the ripening, in essence extending our season well into September.  You may also notice that the fruit is quite a bit larger than usual, apparently owing to the additional time it spent on the trees — and the additional water that we applied to them during the heat.

Still, September will be a challenging month for us this year.  Over the next few weeks you’ll see some “outsourcing” in your CSA boxes as we feature some items from our neighbors and friends to augment the relatively “slim pickings” from our own fields.  Going into October, you’ll start to see the seasonal change in your boxes as our Fall crops begin to come into production.

As for the strawberries, if all the cards fall into place, we might get a small window to harvest in late October or early November.  We’ll need warm, dry weather with no crazy wind, no early frost and not too much rain.  It doesn’t happen often, but if it does we’ll give you a “sneak preview” of next Spring’s berries.

Thanks,

Pablito