First Rain

Yesterday’s rainstorm failed to live up to its’ billing down here in our area—at most we got a tenth of an inch or two. In some ways I should be happy it didn’t rain more—we can continue to pick the strawberries as long as they stay more or less dry, and the beans don’t like the wet, cool weather either—but it’s always sort of a let-down when something you have worked so hard to prepare for doesn’t materialize.  

Because growers never really know if an early storm will end up being stronger than forecast, or if it will be followed by others that cumulatively leave the ground too wet to get into with a tractor, there is always a flurry of activity in our area before the first major storm of the year.  For us, there is the rush to get ground worked up for the last field plantings we’ll do this season—spring onions, green garlic, fava beans, fennel, and over-wintering cauliflower varieties. We are also scrambling to finish our strawberry beds for next year’s crop. Because they can make them taller and straighter than I could myself, we hire a local company to lift up our beds. The rest of the preparations—laying drip tape and mulch, punching holes to plant through, setting up our irrigation system, cutting drainage trenches, and seeding the roadways with barley –we do ourselves.

There is also the work of planting cover crops and getting areas prone to erosion ready before the first major rains arrive. Steep roadways we seed to barley and spread rice straw on.  We take the steeper fields out of production and plant to cover crops usually by the 15^th of October. The last thing I find myself scrambling to do before the first major storm of the year is to make sure all of the things that shouldn’t get wet—fertilizer, cover-crop seed, old tractors, boxes, and certain implements—are under cover.  And to make sure all of the truck windows are rolled up.

Despite all of the hard work that comes with it, deep down I really look forward to this change in the weather. By the end of September the drab and dusty landscape around us starts to get old. The Santa Cruz and Santa Lucia Mountains are often obscured either behind fog or a late summer haze. Even if yesterday’s storm was smaller than expected, it did help to wash the layer of dust off of the trees and shrubs, and after it had swept through, the mountainous panorama that surrounds us was revealed in all of its glory.