Rainy days, and on, and on...

Well, you may have noticed, we've been getting a lot of rain around here lately! For a while there back in early spring it was pretty dry and everyone was waiting eagerly for rain. That rain has come in spades!

A familiar sight lately!

Looking at weather data from the past few years, according to Wunderground.com, we've definitely had a very wet May! The precipitation total for this month has been 5.25 inches, compared to 4.36 in 2024, and 2.15 in 2023. Looking back at March, things were dry with 0.79 inches of precipitation this year and 2.92 in 2024 and 1.57 in 2023. I will note that this data is from a record station not exactly in Poolesville, but in the general area.

We recognize this climate change affecting us more and more each year. Mike reached out to our local farmer network recently to share our experiences and challenges with the wet spring so far. A fellow Montgomery County farmer, Tom from Sandy Spring Gardens, who really stays up to date with weather data and trends, shared this with us:

I have a friend who works at NOAA. He says they are seeing something new. They are calling it “increasing persistence of the weather patterns.”  Which means when we get a rainy day, often it’s followed by more rainy days. And a period of dry weather will go on and on… longer than the historic pattern in our weather records. 

I know that some farmers are skeptical about climate change. But last fall we had 11 days of rain in September. That was the longest period of consecutive rainy days in 150 years of local weather records. Immediately following that, we had 38 days with no measurable rain last October-November. THAT was the longest period of days with no rain in the 150-year local weather records. 

This kind of information is hard to ignore, and makes it pretty clear that climate change is our new reality.

Every farm is different, has different topography and soil quality, so each one will have a unique set of challenges when it comes to climate change and specifically, rainfall. We here at One Acre Farm have a couple fields that just don't do well with excessive rainfall, especially when we have several consecutive days of rain where the soil doesn't get a chance to dry out.

Here you can seem how the walking paths are pretty washed out and how soft the soil has been.

This impacts the whole trajectory of the farm in several ways. Not in any particular order, but here is how we have been experiencing this rainy May:

• Certain crops, or sections of certain crops, are just too wet and therefore unhappy. Their leaves turn yellow, the overall plant growth gets stunted, and what they produce is often smaller than usual or bolts too quickly.

  • For example, we have several rows of broccoli in our wettest field and in the wettest part of that wettest field, the broccoli comes in small, turns yellow too quickly, and goes to flower sometimes before we've gotten a chance to harvest it. It also doesn't hold up well in the cooler.

  • Our napa cabbage beds look like an upside down bell curve graph, with the middle of the bed being the wettest, the plants there can only produce mini napa cabbages.

The outlined area is the wettest part of this wet field, and you can see how the plants look smaller and more yellow than the rest - not happy plants!

• When the soil is so waterlogged it prevents us from getting a tractor onto the field. This has certainly pushed back our timeline of planting. There are many steps to getting a field ready to plant, all of which require a tractor at our scale, so this heavy rainfall has meant we've been mightily delayed in making beds. New plants keep arriving and we have nowhere to put them!

• Super wet fields also mean we can't get in there to weed. When your boots sink into the mud so much that you can barely get them out again, it's time to find another job. Now that it's warming up, the weeds are just as happy as the crops, so we have a backlog of weeding projects to finish.

This was a particularly muddy day!

As CSA members you might see some of these effects. We always strive to give you the best quality vegetables, but there may be some size variation in certain items due to the field conditions, or the fridge-holding capacity might be reduced.

The timeline for our summer crops might also be delayed, the tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and peppers having gotten into the ground later than usual. So if at some point you wonder why zucchini hasn't shown up in your share yet, remember this rainy month!

Over the years we've looked into different types of mitigation techniques to help with our wet field problem. There are a couple of options out there, all quite expensive! To get some technical assistance with this issue, we're going to have a visit from some folks from the State Ag office in the middle of June. Hopefully they can share their expert opinion with us and help figure out the best way forward so we can reduce our drainage problems.

However, on the brighter side, our high tunnels are just crushing it with how well everything is growing! The plants are getting super tall already and we've got some great farmers'-harvest cucumbers - coming to your tables soon! Here are a few pictures of the happy plants in there:

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

~ Sophia