Last week was all about the rain that never came. The weather predictions were calling for a very high chance of rain on Thursday afternoon. It has been a dry start to the summer and so this prediction sent us into overdrive trying to get as much planted and seeded into the ground as possible in order to get the rain on it just in time. When we plant seeds directly into the soil we do so with a tool called a push seeder. It seeds one row at a time and has plates that can be adjusted in order to control how far apart the seeds fall into the soil based on their size. You can plant pretty much any vegetable with this tool. However each individual row must be planted at once. So if you are planting a 1000 foot bed and there will be 3 rows in the bed you end up walking the bed three times. Each time you switch to a different seed you often change the size of the plate hole and check to make sure the seeds are coming out into the soil properly. My point being, it can take some time. So here I was racing against the clock, trying to seed as much ground as possible before 2pm when the rain was predicted to start falling. I seeded greens and beets and corn and more. All in all I probably walked about 25 miles just seeding. And when I finished, prior to the time of the predicted rain, I felt pretty good. I took the clothes off the line and waited for the amazing rain. It never came. On Saturday Kevin went to work trying to figure out how to get water on all these things. We started with the sweet potatoes. They had been planted on Thursday as well. The race seems to have been in vain. The roads around the farm are stirring up dust no matter how slow you drive and we are hoping for some rain. Some of the seeds that I planted have popped up despite their lack of water, others may need to be re-seeded which is something we often have to do for many reasons. In the meantime we will keep watering things and hoping for some rain to dampen all this dust.
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