80%

It’s dry. The weather reports give optimistic outlooks. 80% chance of rain every 5 days or so. But every 5 days or so, the rain passes to the east, or dissipates before it arrives.We pump water out of the generous depths of the ground, and the ground itself just soaks it back up and asks for more. I think about where that water has been. All over the world, a thousand times or more.

We don’t till the ground if we don’t absolutely have to in this weather. Where our next planting is going, I set out the irrigation to presoak the ground. Otherwise, when we shape the seedbeds with bone dry soil, we do so making a plum of soil dust. And it’s been windy too. That soil just blows away, and I’m just there saying to myself, “Well, there it goes. Not getting that back”. And we won’t…won’t get it back. Better to just keep it in the first place.

So we wait on the field prep, let the weeds be a cover crop until some rain comes, move the sprinklers from one crop to the next, one planting to the following. Each week that we don’t have real rain we will have to leave the irrigation on each area for that much longer, to soak it, to satiate the thirsty ground. I have to make judgment calls, what has more impact at this moment? The salad or the carrots? New plantings take priority and often need a double dose to stay moist enough to germinate the seeds.

Momma Nature seems to be swinging to the other direction so far this year from the past season. Where we have been wet to our detriment, this year we are dry. We had some hot windy days all in a row that put us way into a water deficit faster than anytime I remember. “Is it climate change” I wonder to myself “that is making this all so extreme in each seasons, each one having a defining level of detriment and diufficulty?” All the while I think to myself that if it is, Momma Nature is still being very generous. If I were her, and I had a bad case of the humans, I would do much worse.

It’s dry. We water. The moment we get a half inch of rain, or 5 inches, we will knock those weeds down and get some cover crops in, with as little soil dust as possible.