Hottest summer on record...again

Colloquially, farmers are always talking about the weather. In the early years of the CSA it's true, I did often write about the weather and the effects of it—especially the rain, which cancels tractor work and delays critical spring planting until ground conditions improve. The reason, of course, that farmers talk about the weather is that it has such a determining effect on the outcome of our season's work.

As my farm systems became more resilient and experienced, my decision-making allowed the farm to meet the thinner margins of success offered by tough weather years, and so the effect of the weather on the farm work list has diminished (and the presence of the weather here in the weekly CSA writing has similarly diminished over the years).

But, this heat: this heat was a new thing. It's been hot before, yes. We all know that summer is hot around here, with highs over 90 not uncommon. But that's in July, not June, and for perhaps five days at a stretch—not a long-range forecast filled with ten days over 90, all 90s with no end in sight, and upper 90s in the middle of it all. I looked in the record, and so many consecutive days over 90 hasn't happened even in the summer, never mind the spring. Just like last September, when an unheard of five days in the upper 90s made the weather again the topic of the week, cooking some of the winter squash as it sat in the field, it's not only that it's hot; it's that we've been having this outlier heat also in outlier seasons.

Farmers tend to learn from the older generation and from their neighbors, adopting tried and true best practices because, in an annual project such as farming, the timescale of innovation and learning from one's own mistakes would be far too long to develop one's own knowledge, experience, and methods from scratch. Systems that still function in unusual conditions can't be worked out on one's own, since those unusual conditions come round so rarely. But here—and in recent years—we are more and more often experiencing conditions that never have occurred before in our region.

Normally, the rule is not to transplant tender young plants in the heat of the day, nevermind when it's going to be in the 90s—wait it out; don't plant. And if it's merely 5 days in the mid 90s, that's well and good—but what if it's 2 weeks of hot right at the end of spring planting season, when a 2-week delay in planting would mean a critical gap in vegetable production some months from now? So we did the planting and I figured that, since it's been hot before, these temperature conditions aren't really that unusual... they're just longer-lasting. I didn't, however, account for how such heat would affect young transplants as opposed to the established plants that barely notice July's peak summer heat. Or, for that matter, how so many consecutive days over 90 would add cumulative stress to young plants and dry out the soil faster than the irrigation system could replace it. Relying on experience learned over decades of farming (my own and my neighbors') didn't hold when faced with conditions not seen over that period.

So I spent a weekend keeping plants alive, hour by hour directing water to where it was needed most—not so that plants would grow well, as is the typical role of irrigation, but so they would not immediately die. We decided the best way forward was to set up overhead sprinklers in the new tomatoes, to cool their leaves and give them a chance to recover–something I've never done, or heard of. I ran it 20 minutes every hour, for their first day in the ground. The soil was plenty wet at the roots; the plants just couldn't move water up to their leaves fast enough to keep from being dried out and wilting in the sun. I rebuilt the lettuce sprinkler system to reach farther side-to-side, covering the outside beds that typically don't need much water. I filled the transplanter tank and drove over the tiny new squash and cucumber plants, twice a day, letting water out into the holes where the new plants were struggling, to save irrigating time for crops with more-developed root systems. Typically, we barely think about newly-planted squash and cucumbers for the better part of a week. I made decisions between irrigating the potatoes and onions, which were needing water for good yields during a critical period of putting on bulk, and irrigating the peppers, whose leaves became soft and floppy in the dryness and heat. It typically doesn't matter which crop gets irrigated today or tomorrow, but when everything needs water at once (even though it had all been irrigated within the week prior, the usual interval), new decisions need to be made.

Night was a period of calm before a repeat the following day, and when the temperatures dropped on that Monday, the feeling was of the passing of a storm at sea: doing the best I can to batten the hatches and ride it out, responding to the conditions moment-to-moment, and coming out to inspect when it's all over. And on Monday, most everything was alive. It was a new feeling knowing that, while the plants on the farm normally persist without help–that being their nature–this time, these new plants would have likely not made it.

Experience allows for meeting more challenging conditions, and finding success where margins are slimmer, the route to a positive result more narrow. I'm not sure what I would have done early on, or what a new farmer would do. The farming principles and methods we use are well suited to the variety of conditions typically experienced in this region over the last 50 years; what I was seeing was the breakdown of our normal growing systems when met with unheard-of conditions. Nobody in this region has ready answers to these problems.

Over the years I have adapted systems in response to unusual pressures of rain, wind, dryness, and insects. In a hot-summer climate, growing hot-weather crops, heat bedevils us workers but not so often the plants—they need it to grow. But here, a new pressure: unusual heat, far too much of it, at the wrong time. And in response, I learned new tools to add to the system when conditions require. And when this happens again—because it surely will—I will be ready with these methods, not as outlier stopgaps, but perhaps as normal elements of a hot-weather planting system.