Farmers love talking about the weather. With good reason – it impacts everything that happens here. In that vein: Friday and Saturday marked the first 100+ degree days, a milestone that often happens this time of year. According to the calendar, it’s still technically spring for a few more weeks and the forecast is showing cooler 90 degree days this upcoming week. After a month or two of real summer weather, even the mid 90s can start feeling cool. But it’ll be a while until it’s anything resembling cold again, usually mid October.
The characteristic Capay Valley summer heat, while unfathomably warm at times, enables such amazing melons, tomatoes, and other fruits of summer. It also helps us quickly dry our flowers to make wreaths later in the year.
The heat necessitates careful attention to our irrigation infrastructure and irrigation scheduling and extra attention to post-harvest handling. Having water and electricity (to run water pumps and to power our cold storage) are crucial.
Heat also necessitates extra care for the people and animals of the farm! The sheep are currently grazing the cover crops in the walnut orchard, no doubt glad for the shade of those majestic trees and for Rye’s stellar shearing job. For us humans, we continually hold heat safety trainings to make sure everyone knows the symptoms of heat stress and how to prevent it: water, shade, and rest. Everyone has a personal half gallon water cooler and each harvest team has a large water jug too. We start and end, our workday earlier, and take more breaks. Heat is no joke and keeping everyone safe and healthy is our main goal, above harvesting great produce, soil health, and all the other things we focus on. It’ll take us all a bit of time to acclimatize to the warmer temperatures, and it requires constant vigilance, but it’s just part of what summer means for us.
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager
