Old-School Weather

Most years I write about the weather from time to time, except this year it hasn't come up as often. Perhaps that is because this summer we've only had two periods of weather: HOT & DRY and now, COOL & WET. The dry period sort of snuck up because it didn't quite feel like it was never raining. Rain was very often in the forecast, and that threat of rain very often determined the worklist on the farm. But every time rain was predicted, the skies darkening promisingly, the small storms missed us out here and then bloomed into giant thunderstorms by the time they reached the city. The ground got drier and drier, limiting tillage, until I gave up hoping for rain and assembled the overhead sprinklers in an unplanted field just to get the ground into a condition where it might eventually be able to grow something.

And yet last week I went up the road to visit the local welder, who in conversation about the weather (an obligatory topic), noted how well his neighbor's soybeans are doing next to the shop. He mentioned getting consistent rain, much to my surprise, but I knew what he was going to tell me next because he'd told me about it before: "It's just like back in the 70s when there were a number of great growing years..." He went on to describe this year's storms all coming up from the south, dropping just the right amount of rain... And I went on to describe how, yes, I know those rainstorms well... I watch them skirt my farm to the north and head right up here to you!

My neighbors, from whom I learned to farm and now retired after growing vegetables here since the 70s, often mention that back then a storm came through just about every week to drop an inch of rain, the perfect amount. They didn't even use irrigation until the 90s, the rain being so reliable. But weather patterns are changing. For example, every year there is usually 5 days of cool and rainy weather during the first part of August; I watch the forecast closely, for this is the fleeting window to sow spinach seeds in the ground. This year the cooler period came right on schedule...but with no rain in sight, I waited until the next window of good spinach-planting weather: a true rainy week towards the end of August, too late to re-plant if it didn't come up well. I had high hopes given that week's rainy forecast, but, as it turned out, that week kicked off these last 4 weeks of rain (pretty much every Wednesday, like clockwork, and on other days as well), which turned out to be too MUCH rain for the tiny spinach, many of which didn't survive germination. The survivors are fine, there just aren't as many as I'd hoped.

Sure, all weather is local and no trend predicts the weather at any particular spot at any particular time, as the welder's quite different growing season indicates, his shop being not 5 miles north of me. But old timers talk how the summer weather these days is just not like it used to be--and, unlike most "back in my day" lamentations, this one is empirically true! The year-to-year variability has increased; the range of weather considered "normal" and unremarkable is getting broader all the time. So much of farming relies on predictable weather, because plants like predictable, stable growing conditions. This widely varying weather, from drought to deluge, late freeze to blazing July, creates new rhythms we don't yet understand and can't adapt to on the fly.

Several years ago, I gave up on the idea that I could trust the old-time weather patterns from the era of the farmers I'd learned from, and began to intentionally diverge from the rubrics learned from those older farmers. I began doing fieldwork when it is possible, rather than waiting for conditions to be ideal, as ideal conditions became more elusive, and adjusted other practices to be more adaptable to changing conditions. And as weather continues to become more unpredictably extreme, I'll continue to shift to more resilient growing systems, like transplanting rather than seeding directly into the ground. These sorts of things take more work and used to feel silly if most years are all right, but the more those "outlier" years become the norm, the less silly it feels to instead see the "regular" times as the outliers and be sure to be prepared for an ever-widening range of possibilities in the future.