NEWS

By: Greg Hartsell, Twin Oak Farm

I often get comments after we’ve had a lot of rain along the lines of “We have had a lot of rain the last couple days, but I guess that’s good for your crops.” The reply is always “not necessarily.”

 We certainly depend on rain, but too much rain can be more devastating than drought. Heavy rain impacts every aspect of our operation. In addition to making it difficult to harvest our crops, it also causes problems with preparing fields for planting and caring for crops under production. Constant wet weather causes and spreads disease that results in poor fruit quality or decay. Fruit pollination is a problem as well. Bees don’t work during wet weather and wet blooms will not pollinate.

 We prefer drier growing conditions where we can control the amount of water with irrigation. Ideally we could use about an inch or inch and a half of rain every Saturday afternoon. So if you can all put your request for that, we would appreciate it. Extremely dry weather is more easily managed as long as our water supply for irrigation can be maintained. Typically extremely dry weather is accompanied by extreme heat which also causes plant stress and pollination problems. Stressed plants shut down growth just to survive, therefore depriving fruit of necessary nutrients. This causes low quality fruit and fruit diseases. Heat stress also causes some fruits, such as tomatoes, to abort blooms resulting in no fruit later in the season. Bees tend to work less in extreme heat causing pollination problems which results in low quality fruit or no fruit.

The challenges of fruit and vegetable production are real. Weather is just one of them.