Greetings from the farm – Thursday, May 10, 2007

We are in the midst of trying to recover from our 1 day flood here on the farm. We received 6 ½ inches of rain from Sunday a.m. to Monday a.m. with 1 ½ inches of that coming in about 30 minutes on Sunday morning. What a sight that was. Even though our fields are contoured and have some slope to them it actually looked like it was a lake of water when it was raining!! At the present time we know we have lost about 300 tomato plants and are not sure about the rest. They are yellowing quickly from the water soaked ground. We are praying that this warm weather and sunshine will dry the ground out fast enough for them. We had just planted them out on Saturday, 1050 tomato, pepper, and eggplant, as we had know idea it was going to rain so hard. We always have extra transplants of these as they are good sellers in the greenhouse so we can replant most of what we have lost. We always way over plant anyway but you just hate to see it lost.

We spent yesterday recovering what onions we could that had had the dirt washed away from them. For the most part these and the beets, carrots, and radishes seemed to have faired o.k. We will have to wait and see on the latter as they were not really up high enough yet to be able to tell. The potatoes, peas, and green beans are growing well and do not seem to have been bothered by the deluge of water. We did not have the sweet corn in the ground yet and it’s a good thing as that field washed pretty bad. You just never know what that amount of water can do.

On a more positive note, our pond is now full and was actually overflowing for about 2 days!! Can’t wait to get it stocked with fish latter this summer. We have 3 flocks of chickens going on the farm right now. We are babysitting some Silkie chickens and their babies for some friends of ours, we have our new batch that we hatched from our own flock that we will use as replacement birds and for meat, and we have our layers which are giving us about 1 dz eggs a day. Our sheep are doing great and loving all this green grass. They are actually having a hard time keeping it ate down. Our ram was put with the ewes on January 10 so we are looking at lambing around the end of May. We are hoping to have some twins this go around. Next week hopefully will remain dry so we can really get busy putting things back together.

 

Growing for you, Beth