When is the weather going to co-operate ??!!

[Wi-sunflower]

I'm just feeling down today and need to vent a bit.

So far this year in the Wisconsin area, the weather has been rather lousy.I started Saturday markets the beginning of May and all but the first market has had at lest some rain and or cold and wind. We still did OK, but I have to wonder how good we might have done if the weather had been better.

The Saturday that should have been my best, we had rain to start, cool and windy the rest of the day and frost was forecast for the next nite (nearly a week after the last frost date there). Lots of customers were talking about varieties, but then decided to wait til the next week before buying. Of course most of them never did come back.

Now I'm trying to get my own tomatoes planted. We started last Tuesday and that nite they were calling for a chance of frost on Wed nite. Also about a week late for frost here. Oh joy. No way to cover over a thousand plants. We watered everything in hopes it would help keep it away. They needed it anyway.

We planted Tue, Wed and Thurs and got 2500-3000 plants in. That's maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of what we will plant. By then everything needed watering again. It hasn't been warm but it has been WINDY so they dried out fast.

We have a crude way to dump about 1/2 gallon+ of water on the plants from a tank on a trailer while hubby drives me over the row. Some of the plants looked like even that wasn't going to help tho.

Market this Sat was also a bit drippy and cold (50s when it should be 70s). But we got a nice rain at the farm for the plants that nite. Then Sunday nite we got almost 2 inches of rain.

Great, except it's fizzy again today even tho there is nothing showing on Radar. There is rain in the forecast for tomorrow (another market day) and the weekend again. It's only in the 50s too. I sent the crew home this morning as we didn't have anything we could do. Last year we were planting on our sandy ground but this year it's some of our better, but heavier ground that we shouldn't work when it's wet.

I don't know WHEN we will be able to get back to planting. That means we will probably be at least a week, if not a lot more, later than we should be for planting. Even those plants that ARE in won't be doing much if the weather doesn't warm up soon.

Sorry this is so long, but I just needed to get it out of my system. Hubby won't listen to me about this at all. Too much of a girly thing for him. But at times I would just like to go out and scream. It's so frustrating to have to depend on something so fickle for everything you are counting on.

Thanks for providing a place where I can vent and others will understand.

Carol

[Zana]

Go ahead and vent. I'm not working on anywhere near that scale, and I'm so far behind in getting my surrogate garden prepped and in its ridiculous. Cold, wet, and more wet. Hopefully we've (you and me) seen the last of the frosts.

In the mean time I'm been out in the rain and cold cleaning up the flower beds here at the house because we have an realtors' open house tomorrow. Sighhhhh....I hate the process of selling. Sheeeeesh....what a pain in the arse. But that means that I get to come in and warm up with a hot cup of coffee and check out TV. So all is not totally bad.

Good luck Carol, I hope the weather turns around for you as soon as possible.

[WVTomatoMan]

One of the good things about forums is that you can vent with people who are sympathetic.

When is the weather going to cooperate you ask? I don't know it hasn't truly cooperated around here since 2005.

Good luck.

Randy

[ReaverG]

Not this year, according to Accuweather. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but reading this might help. http://www.accuweather.com/news-stor...hg=1&article=9

[Wi-sunflower]

That is exactly what we've been seeing in my area. We get a day or 2 of really warm weather then back to the refrigerator for at least a week. We haven't had anywhere near the storms we should have had by now either. Yesterday was an exception. A few ugly storms went thru just south of me.

Zana, I remember the last time we moved 20+ years ago and it wasn't enjoyable at all. It would be even less so now with all the farm junk we've acumulated.

Well I can deal with the less than warm summer if I have to. It won't be pleasant, but we can compensate some. Right now what I need is about a week or so of dry so we can get a lot of things planted. We also need to seed our winter squash yet.

The problem with asking for the dry weather is that some years once it dries up then we don't get enough rain to keep it all alive. I can irrigate some of it but not all of our farm.

I guess farmers just aren't happy with the weather no matter what kind we get. There is always some reason you want something different.

Carol

[dice]

Actually the main issue is the tillability of the soil, right? (Well,
how much they don't grow in cold weather, too, of course.)

Have you ever planted a field of tomatoes without tilling?
Usually that is done on a commercial scale by setting plugs
into a recently flailed or mown mulch, but perhaps one could
just unpot seedlings, set them in place on top of the soil, and
heap a little mulch around them, then fertilizer by top-dressing
and water if it is not raining.

If you get too frustrated, you can designate 20 feet of row or
something for an experiment and go try it.

[Barbee]

This has been a long long planting season for us too. Memorial Day weekend, we got close to 850 acres planted. As we were driving the equipment back home to stop for the night, the heavens opened up and we got a goose drowner. 3+ inches on the ground we had just planted..water (and beans) running right to the ditches.
So we've been replanting like crazy plus trying to get the other 400 acres in the ground. Had 100 acres to go last night and ran out of beans!
So today we are trying to finish up and it's thundering out there. Hopefully we'll get it in before the rain hits.

[Wi-sunflower]

Dice,

We did try something like that a few years ago with early plants that we then covered with a cold frame. Our proble now is the fact that the plants are huge and they would look like Vesuvious before we got them covered. Not to mention where would we get enough mulch to do several thousand plants.

We tried mulching plants with old straw a few years ago. We got parts of 2 rows done, maybe 100 plants, and no one wanted to continue. Way too much work.

Hopefully the weather will break in everyones favor soon, whatever you need.

Actually our broccoli is doing fairly well, so the cooler weather is good for something.

Carol

[dice]

Not to mention where would we get enough mulch to do several thousand plants.

That is a good point. Dedicated no-till farmers are pretty much
growing the mulch in place over the winter right where they are
going to plant in spring. So the same fields that grow the crop
grow the mulch, too, but that is something one needs to have
decided to do at the end of the previous summer to have the
mulch there already.

[dice]

One other thing: up in your area, you might have an issue with
low soil temperatures if you mulch too early.

Do you know dedicated no-till farmers in your area? If so, what
do they do about this issue? (If they have grown a winter cover
crop and simply mash it down with a flail before planting,
the mulch would basically always be there, so how long would
it take the soil to warm up?)

[PaulF]

What started as cool and dry is now cool and wet. Come on hot and drier.

[Wi-sunflower]

I know plenty of no-till grain farmers around here, but I don't know of any no-till vegie farmers here. Mostly vegie farmers use the plastic beds if they do anything other than just planting.

Personally we used them a few years, but they were more trouble than they were worth. You need too much special equipment that we didn't have. We just plant into well tilled ground and I have an OLD Allis G cultivator tractor that I use to try to keep the weeds controled as best I can.

Yup the soil temp sure aren't anything to brag about this year. We planted zucchini seeds on 5/22 and they just germinated this week. Usually a week or less is all they take. We planted a bit of winter squash and watermelons the next week and they are also being poky about coming up. As cold as it is I'm kind of glad we didn't get the rest of our squash planted. We could have lost a whole lot of money on seed.

I can't imagine what Barbee has gone thru with the weather and over 800 acres. They must have lost a small fortune on seeds. We plant about 30-40 acres in vegies and less than 100 to grain. Hubby got all but a small 5 acre field planted with the grain but I still have most of the vegie stuff to do because of the weather. Our season is rather short and when the weather makes it even shorter, it can be a challenge around here.

Well the weatherman was wrong again. The forecast for today was for "off and on" rain most of the day. Right now it looks like the rain went south of Wisconsin. I don't mind missing it right now, except I skipped a market partly due to the forecast. But I have plenty of other stuff I need to do around the house today.

Carol

[Barbee]

Well we finished up for the most part last night about 3am.
We still have a few areas to replant, and then we'll double crop our wheat and barley once it's harvested, but all in all, it feels like we're done.
We farm 1600 acres of soybeans and 200ish acres of wheat/barley. It's all done no till and our biggest problem this year came from our fields we did the cover crops on. It just held too much moisture to be able to get in there and plant. We had to run the disc lightly thru about 400 acres to try to dry it out.
Normally, the cover crop causes us no problems at all and we love using them. Rye is generally the cover crop we use. This was just an odd year with being almost in a drought situation for the winter, and getting such heavy rains right before planting time.
Carol, to you 1600 acres probably sounds like a ton of work..but being no till, it's not bad. Our equipment is very big and our fields are big, so it goes pretty fast once you get dry enough to go. We switched over to all no till in 1994 and it was at that time a big risk due to the cost of switching over.
To me, 2500-3000 tomato plants sounds like 10x the work of 1600 acres of no till. LoL, so there you go...
There is a family a little ways up the road from us that does large scale veggie farming. I believe they use the plastic in long hill type rows and then runs a cultivator between the hills about once a week or so.

[Wi-sunflower]

the plastic in long hill type rows and then runs a cultivator between the hills about once a week or so.

Yup, that sounds like what I was trying to describe.

We had an old plastic layer for a while, but it didn't work all that well. It's since been used for part for some other things we made. You need a special transplanter for the plastic too or need to plant by hand. Hubby tends to be too "tight-fisted" when it comes to buying decent equipment. It took me years to talk him into a chisel plow. He finally got 1 this year after the neighbor used one on our corn stubble last year.

Generally our tomato plants are way too big for planting thru the plastic too. Some of the plants I have in the greenhouse right now are close to 3 feet tall already. We will use an old 1 bottom plow to open a furrow, lay them in the furrow with only a decent amount showing on top. Then we cover most of the plant with soil from the furrow. They root up really well that way and it goes fairly fast. We can plant over a thousand plants with 3-4 people in a 4-5 hour day and then get them watered in in another hour or so. Actually about an hour / tank of water. We can do about 6 -7 rows with a tank. Some days we will get 8-10 rows planted.

I know I spent about $1400 on squash seed for enough seed for maybe about 10 acres. I can't imagine what you had to spend on seed to re-plant all those soybeans. I know they aren't as much/lb as the squash, yet just the amount you would need would kill us.

But at least you had the chance to re-plant. Those poor farmers last year that were in Iowa and under water for weeks. They lost the seed, chemicals and crop. Some even had to BUY crop from others to fullfill contracts. Ouch.

So I guess no matter how bad I have it, there are others that have it worse.

Carol

[barkeater]

"We had an old plastic layer for a while, but it didn't work all that well"

Ha! When I farmed all my tomatoes were grown on plastic. I never cussed so much as when I was laying down plastic.