The first week of the New Year is generally the time that we throw ourselves into preparations for the coming season with increased vigor—making seed orders, starting transplants in the greenhouse, and checking things off our long project list. This coming week is shaping up to be a very wet one. Between the storm that is expected here this afternoon and what the National Weather Service calls a “potent atmospheric river” event predicted for this weekend, we could get between 3 and 6 inches of rain here—a significant portion of the 23 inches that we get in an average year.
We are mostly well prepared for it. Cover crops are well established on the hillsides and roadways were mulched with straw long ago. The main negative effects the rains have at this point are to hamper harvest activities. When storms are accurately predicted far enough ahead of time we can usually work around them to avoid having our crew harvest in heavy rainfall. Besides the obvious discomfort of being cold and wet, moving around on our sticky, heavy clay soils can be extremely difficult when they turn to mud!
With the fields too wet to get much done outside, our attention will turn to projects in the workshop in the coming weeks. One of my priorities this year is to finally get the precision, vacuum seeder that I bought at an auction a few years ago up and running. This ingenious Italian implement uses vacuum pressure to singulate seeds and place them at a precise spacing in the field. With our current equipment, crops that we direct seed, like carrots, radishes, and turnips, need to be thinned by hand once they come up. This takes a lot of time, and it also means that a lot of seeds are wasted. With the precision seeder, I am hoping to greatly reduce, or eliminate altogether, the need to thin these crops by hand, thus saving both labor and seed costs.
Best wishes to everyone for whatever projects you have in store for the New Year!
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