For those of us who live out in the Central Valley, summer of 2024 has felt endless. Yesterday was Sacto’s 48th of triple digit temperatures this year — a new record and more than double the average. But it’s been even hotter here: every day in October has hit at least 100 degrees — more days than any October, ever. Even for this “hot” area, it’s simply not supposed to be this hot this time of year.
If you live just slightly west of here, though, the intense heat we’ve seen here has been mostly abstract — summer was pretty pleasant in and around the SF Bay while along the coast, it’s been cooler and foggier than usual. All that changed on October 1st when temperatures just about everywhere rocketed up into the 90s and 100s…and pretty much stayed there. For the last week, it’s been hotter many days in the Bay Area than the Central Valley. And nights have actually been cooler here. It’s not fair to say “you know how we feel now”, because we Valley folk are now acclimated to the heat after three months of it. And most of our homes are better prepared for it as well. If you live in the Bay Area or San Francisco, you had it much worse than we did this past week.
But now you do know exactly how our fall and winter crops feel right now. I actually feel bad for them — the plants — when I walk the fields. They are visibly suffering — leaves wilting all afternoon in the hot sun, their shine and color dulled by the apparently endless heat. Remember that these are plants that thrive in moist, cool air and prefer sunlight to be filtered by clouds — does that sound like someone you know? Unlike human beings, they can’t really acclimate to higher temperatures even over time.
October has been getting hotter here over the last ten years, but it’s also gotten more extreme overall. In 2021, we had the wettest October in history when a massive storm dropped 10 inches of rain on us, flooding our fields and bringing our operations almost completely to a halt. And quite a few of the last ten years, we have had frost on or near Halloween — sometimes the morning after a 90 degree day.
The bipolar nature of Fall in this area has led us to pursue a scattershot strategy of risk management where we plant small amounts of both cool- and warm-season crops in late summer, with the hope that whatever weather we end up getting will benefit some of them. But we’ve been pushing back our plantings of cool-weather crops, such as Broccoli, Spinach and Lettuce. We used to aim for getting those items in your boxes in late September, but we’ve given up that goal.
Since the overall trend is towards warming, we’re trying to push our summer crops later. For example, this year I planted Sweet Corn in late summer for the first time ever. We know from experience that extreme heat in the summer causes poor pollination in the corn, resulting in lots of missing kernels in the ears. That’s why we don’t try to grow corn for harvest in August. But I have seen a few other farms harvesting later into the fall, and I thought “What if we plant it in early August?”. I wasn’t even sure it would actually make harvestable ears before the weather got cold, but that certainly wasn’t a problem this year. Lo and behold, we harvested a nice amount of corn this week and will have more next week. We also planted a very late planting of Watermelons in mid-July that was so severely stressed by the intense heat that it almost died. We assumed it would never produce fruit but kept watering it and essentially forgot about it until last week, when the crew harvesting winter squash in the field next to it cracked open a fully ripe melon during their break and reported that it was delicious.
With those two items in your boxes, our theme right now is “July in October”, which — fortunately or unfortunately — matches the weather nicely.
Thanks,