A pictorial essay on what too much water does...

It seemed strange with all the nice sunny weather we've had since Tuesday, but last Sunday's ginormous rain event left us with a lot of wet wet work this past week.   To keep this in perspective, our normal May average rainfall is 1.52 inches.  BEFORE last weekends rain event, we had ALREADY accumulated 3 inches of rain in May.  Then, in a 24 hour period we received 1.33 inches.  Even my sandy loam can't deal with that much water at all once.  So what does this do in real life for a farmer, well, they say a picture is worth a 1000 words so here ya go:

Garlic field swamped.  This photo taken AFTER pumping water off for about 8 hours!

River of water draining off the garlic field

Generator/sump pump/bucket in a hole of water set up

Water flowed like this for 2 straight days

What new arugula crop should look like

What 90% of arugula looks like after being waterlogged for 6 days. Brown sad, dying leaves.

So what does this all mean?  Well, not totally sure yet.  Will the arugula recover?  Maybe.  It might also just go to bolt  (or basically set flowers without maybe much of any leaves which is what we harvest).  Will the garlic be damaged - possibly.  So far haven't seen any signs but jury still out on that.  About 30 percent of the crop was under water like that so at least it didn't affect it all.  

So what to do?  What for the fields to dry out, replant and carry on.  It's what we farmers do...

In the meantime...We are coming to the Bayview and Coupeville market with the goodies we could harvest out of the not too wet fields including:

From Willowood Farm:

* Radishes - tons of them!

* Carrot bunches

* Baby head lettuces

* Spinach - mixed types

* Kale and chard bunches

* Braising greens

* Garlic greens

* Dry Beans

* Potato Bags

* Japanese Turnips

From Prairie Bottom Farm:

* Arugula (Coupeville only)

* Chinese Cabbage

* Chives

* Dry Beans

From Ebey Road Farm:

* Emmer Farro

Hope to see you at market!

Farmer Georgie

Willowood Farm of Ebey's Prairie