Spring 2025 | Too Much Rain, Too Little Sun

Early Start

Most “Farm days” start either with an evening drive up to Saint Marys from Montoursville the night before a work day, or early the morning of. This weekend’s was an “early of”, arriving at the Farm around 7am.

As I always do, I’d looked at the weather forecast every day, and multiple times per day, watching the chance of rain bump up on Sunday (the day I’d chosen based on initial weather forecasts) and the chance of rain Saturday decrease, the day I passed on because of it. As I stood out in the beautiful weather of Saturday in Montoursville, in the back of my mind all I could hear was, “you’ll pay for this tomorrow”. And I did.

The day started out quite nice…a bit cool and overcast, but no rain. It’s not ideal but often giving my schedule conflicting with the weather I have little choice, but I sprayed our organic fungicides, insecticides, and started foliar and soil drenches of fertilizer.

Keeps Me Up At Night

There’s no way to sugar coat it, about half of the bines are struggling this Spring and I’m not expecting a good harvest. I’m attributing it primarily to the unusually cold and wet May we had, which is often when the bines are establishing themselves on the coir once trained. Obviously rain they need, however the heat and warmth of sun is also necessary and that was in short supply most of May. The only other possible contributor was a switch in nitrogen source in the Fall putting them to bed. We lost our source of composted horse manure and needed to switch over to mushroom compost.

Some bines are so weak, they’re “un-training” themselves from the coir. It’s both scary and sad as I’ve never seen them like this before. The odd thing is, we’ll have 3-4 bines that look right on schedule, then 3-4 next in line that look abysmal, then another group of healthy, back to unhealthy, etc. Same processes and materials were used consistently through the yard so I’m at a little bit of a loss.

“Do What You Can…”

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

Theodore Roosevelt

And then the rain set in just before noon to add to my demeanor. There are many things Farmers are NOT supposed to do with wet soils, let alone when it’s pouring rain. One of them is getting the tractor out in the fields as it creates ruts and compacts soils. But technically I wasn’t in either of the hop yards, I was mowing the old Keystone Road that is part of our driveway and then moving an implement from near the barn up to where we park the tractor. Still…it was pouring and not ideal.

On an unrelated note, if you would ask if you could see the pictures a Farmer takes during the course of their day, I’d bet many would look like this…

Essentially it consists of images of a combination of the following; things I did at the Farm, things I need to do at the Farm, things that broke/need fixed on the Farm, how much of X, Y, or Z of which product(s) I used, etc.

It’s The Little Things

I was able to get the RPS control unit in place and was going to turn the system on, however I realized I needed to have the filter re-inserted – we take it out at the end of each season. I did at least test it and appears all is good. Yeah, one small win.

At this point, there’s not much one can do except continue the regimen we’ve always followed with nutrition, drip irrigation, fungicides, and insecticides, hope for better weather in June, and keep our fingers crossed. Feel free to keep those fingers and toes crossed along with us 😉