July? More Like February!

 

Free Shipping over $35

We are having an excessively wet and cool July so far.  Since the last few days of June, in fact, it's been in the 70's and even 60's and raining - very much like late winter, rather than mid-summer.  We have gotten sweaters out of the attic!  I'm not sure exactly how much rainfall we've gotten, but at least 6-8" in the last 1.5 weeks.  There's been the obvious good effects of a well-watered garden and just more pleasant days of cool temps - but there's been several downsides as well.  

Firstly, my tomatoes are coming along beautifully - except for all the blossom end rot.  The bottom of a number of the tomatoes is black and rotten.  I've had a bit of this in the garden before, but never this badly, some plants have every tomato half-rotten.  I knew it was usually from a calcium deficiency or a lack of water leading to calcium being unavailable, but neither really makes sense now.  I'd be surprised at the first - I really think my soil is pretty good, especially since we added lime the last time I got a bit of BER - and the second certainly isn't true.  So I investigated a bit, and discovered that blossom end rot can also occur from too much water.  It's not really dealt with in sources, just briefly mentioned as "or overwatering" - nothing further, especially in directives of how to correct the problem.  I'm guessing it's not a common issue, usually the struggle is to keep the thirsty tomatoes wet enough in the dry summer months!  My guess is the excessive water basically dilutes the calcium to an inaccessible amount, but I'd like to know if the balance returns when the soil dries out, or is it permanently flushed from the garden?  

The second negative effect of all the rain is that we've lost another alpaca, Igor this time.  This one is particularly frustrating because we thought we caught his illness earlier than usual this time.  The morning we left for the Kentucky wedding Caleb noticed Igor was isolating and sitting.  We dosed him for both thiamine deficiency and meningeal worms - what we've had issues with in the past - and continued to dose for the full course.  Over the 5 days, he continued to isolate but didn't seem to get worse otherwise.  Usually with both issues they can develop a stagger, often the red flag that something is wrong, and "fixed" just means the slight unsteady gait goes away, not a big difference.  Even when being chased for meds, though, Igor never showed trouble walking, and then the day after he finished the course, he was much worse, and then died as we were starting to treat him with anything else we could think of.  You may be wondering what this has to do with wet weather, especially since it looks like we diagnosed incorrectly.  Probably so.  If it was in fact the meningeal worms, they are conveyed through snail hosts which makes it much more of a problem in warm and wet weather, like right now.  If it was something else, my guess is just plain old intestinal worms, which also get worse in warm (but not hot) and wet weather.  It's so frustrating - it feels like we obviously failed somehow, with another death, but I don't know what else we could have done.  Both intestinal worms and M worms can be treated preventatively with Ivermectin.  We don't like just routinely worming our animals without knowing if they even need it (how most livestock owners do things, which builds resistance in the worms to the medications), but we've started with the alpacas for exactly this reason.  We're tired of losing them, and have decided to basically compromise our dislike of potentially unnecessary medication use for the health of the pacas - and it still didn't work.  We probably should have dosed them again in the last few weeks, it had been about 2 months since the last time, but we were just too busy.  We've been meaning to have a goat/alpaca roundup just to check on worm status, but our weekends just vanish, especially when it's just us here.  

Which leads to the third effect of this weather - the work we can do is so limited!  We had a WWOOFer from Monday afternoon through Thursday evening last week, and she was certainly helpful, but with all the rain we mostly worked indoors.  She helped us pull garlic, and did some weeding, but then it rained the rest of the week.  We carded Alabama's fleece, and I did a bit of spinning while she (ironically) watered - the hoophouse, of course, is still bone-dry without irrigation.  We washed eggs, made soap, made pasta, and such, but the combination of a short-term intern (not enough time to train for solo jobs) and bad weather made for a week of "watch me" teaching.  I like being able to do that, and I'm sure she appreciated the time learning things (including how to knit), but there wasn't much more work done than I could have done myself, which means by the weekend, we weren't caught up enough to do any projects - like a goat/paca roundup.  

The final negative of all the rain is - the grass won't stop growing!  I know, it's a blessing for the animals, usually July is when the grass dies back and everything turns brown and crispy, so this is great for the grazing.  But - we didn't finish mowing the yard last week, and the mown half is already almost as tall as the unmowed part again, and we never even started on the orchard!  It's going to be a fight again, taking most of a weekend just to retame it.  After the last time, we were really intending to keep it in check so that it didn't get out of hand, and here we are just days later, facing a lush jungle that I swear grows visibly by the hour!  I feel so suburban even talking about mowing the grass, but it's really the best way to keep things under control.  Especially in the orchard, it's actually functional, not just aesthetic - when things grow up too much, we lose sight of the small tree seedlings and end up stepping on them, to either their detriment (blueberries) or ours (prickly pear).  Once the trees are large enough, we'll just run the geese and ducks through as mowers, but until then - suburban lawn mower it is!  

Second to last issue - laundry!  We don't have a dryer, just a clothes line outside for summer and one inside for winter.  When it's pouring rain for days on end, but in July so we obviously aren't using the woodstove and the indoor humidity is enough to turn anything wooden or leather fuzzy-green (tables, cabinets, wooden spoons, belts, unused shoes, etc), I have nowhere to dry laundry.  I finally got some done yesterday, after most of 2 weeks - I ran 2 loads, alternating with 2 rounds in the dishwasher, and really I have 2 more loads of laundry left to do!  The solar is also affected by this - without the sun I can't run the dishwasher, food dehydrator, things that would certainly be good indoor jobs - if only we had the power!  

The final downside of the cool, rainy weather is that it puts me in hibernation mode.  Especially after such a busy spring, it turns almost wintery like this, and I just want to curl up on the couch and knit all day.  Not good for all the chores that are still there.  I am definitely at a breathing point in the year, but not hibernation!  Looks like I'm probably in the clear now, though, it's calling for drier and 80's and climbing from here out - back to our usual July!  I know I'll be missing this weather as soon as it's gone - by this afternoon, probably, when I'm sweating at my market table in 82* sun :) but its kind of useful in a perverse way to realize all the negatives of what can seem like a nice change.  It'll help me count the blessings of the summer heat to have counted the curses of the wet cool weather!

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
To help us prevent spam, please prove you're human by typing the words you see here.