I was busy sticking lettuce transplants in the ground with help from Jane, one of our CSA members. We finished up after lunch just as it started to rain.

I was very happy to see the rain. Even though only a week ago, the ground had been too wet to work, the wind had really dried out the soil and the stuff we had transplanted a couple of days before were starting to wilt.

We don’t have water available across the road yet. I got a couple of 100 feet of 3/4″ black plastic pipe running through the culvert under the road and up the ditch but that cobbled together irrigation system needs to be re-assembled since I pulled it all apart late last fall to prevent freeze damage.

Jane and I moved into the greenhouse when the rain set in and started harvesting spicy greens.

After Jane left, I cut a couple of tubs of greenhouse arugula and went to harvest collard raab. It was raining and thundering. I picked 8 bunches when I there was a bright flash of lightening… I was done picking collard raab.

One cool thing while I was picking the collard raab. Every time it thundered, I could hear a wild tom turkey gobble a couple of hundred yards away in the woods.

It is the breeding season now for wild turkeys and while the toms gobble to attract turkey hens, they will also gobble at almost any loud noise because they are so, um, romantically inclined, to put it politely.

Owls hooting, crows cawing, thunder, truck doors slamming… all can set off a tom turkey gobbling at this time of year.

Hail Storm

After seeing the bright flash of lightening while standing at the highest point in an open field, I headed back to the greenhouse.
I was messing around in front of the greenhouse when I heard this roar and I could not figure out what it was. I seriously thought it might be a tornado but there was no wind and and the sky was gray, not that scary yellow color it gets sometimes during thunderstorms.

About 20 seconds later, I heard what sounded like .22 rifle shot cracks and then there was a deluge of quarter-sized hail falling. That is what I had heard, the hail moving through the trees heading my way. Not being too smart, I stood there with my mouth wide open until I got hit a couple of times and ducked into the greenhouse.

I stood in the greenhouse watching the hail hit the plastic and waiting to see if the plastic would be torn and shredded by the hail.

Although the hail only lasted about 90 seconds, it covered the ground white. My first thought went to all those transplants we had spent the last two days setting out. I got in the Toyota farm truck and headed across the road to check out the damage. Everything looked ok and I noticed all these little quarter-sized balls of hail already melting and slowly added much needed moisture to the soil. The kind of moisture that will seep in slowly and go deeper than just rain.

Lightening has been called poor man’s fertilizer. There is a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere but it is not accessible to plants until the energy from lightening breaks up the molecules and they recombine with oxygen and fall to earth as rain or hail.

So those little balls of hail were actually beneficial to our crops. Adding a natural and organic source of nitrogen to our crops and who knows what kind of other trace elements and minerals.

We can run sprinkler and drip tape irrigation to keep crops alive but nothing makes them pop like rain from a good thunderstorm.

Decompressing

Saturday after I got home from the market, I watered the greenhouse, checked the critters, gathered eggs, took a quick nap, then headed down to the beach.

Normally, the couple of times a year I get away from the farm for a few days, I tote graph paper, yellow legal pads, seed catalogs, and a couple of farming books. My intention is always to to conduct some farm planning without being interrupted by actual farming. Farming on paper is fun, I have made millions paper farming.

This trip, I did none of that. I carried no reading material.

Our farm was in good hands. My dad watered the greenhouse if needed in the mornings and checked on our 3 dogs and cat. Joe, another CSA member came by and gathered the eggs for two days and checked on the greenhouse in the afternoon to see if it needed watering.

Our farm does not start up at 8 am or shut down at 5 pm. It is a biological entity that is in action 24/7.

Being able to step away from the farm for 2 and 1/2 days and knowing that my Dad and Joe were here to keep things going was peace of mind that money can’t buy.