New Hampshire farmers who struggled through last year’s hot, dry weather are now struggling through wet and cold weather that has put the growing season on hold.
“Usually farms like to have corn planted by around May 20 or so. But there is still ground, a lot of it, that has not been planted … maybe 20-25 percent of the acreage,” said Carl Majewski, a field specialist with UNH Cooperative Extension. “It’s not very often that you have a delay like this.”
He added: “As far as hay crops, it’s been a phenomenal year for growing grass. The bad news is that it has been a terrible year for harvesting it.”
At Dimond Hill Farm in Concord, owner Jane Presby had a similar on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand take.
“The good news is we have water in the soil again. But it’s so wet, I don’t want to take the heavy equipment onto the ground,” Presby said. “We have a piece of property across street that I barely have dropped a plow into.”
Tim Basset of Contoocook’s Gould Hill Farm also lamented the cool, wet conditions.
“We are a month to a week behind planting some crops as the cold and rain delay things,” Basset wrote in an email.
As for the temperature, Presby said she has mainly planted “cold crops” like greens that don’t mind chilly soil and air temperatures but is holding back on planting produce like beans and, of course, sun-loving tomatoes.
“The tomatoes in the greenhouse are in full blossom,” awaiting the move out into the field, she said.
Due to those tomatoes and other crops, Presby has had to take on the unexpected expense of heating the greenhouse more and longer than usual. She’s not alone.
“I don’t think there are a lot of farms that counted on using supplemental heat in June,” Majewski said. “But they are.”
Not everything is bad, however. Almost anything is better than last year’s crippling drought.
“To me, the drought is worse than the rain and cold, but we’ll see,” Presby said.
Majewski agreed: “The drought affects more than the crops – last year had wells going dry, there were vegetable farms that couldn’t irrigate, dairy farms that lost their wells.”
Notably, New Hampshire fruit trees that were clobbered in 2016 when a late frost killed many buds seem to be doing very well this year, despite the warm end of winter followed by a cold March.
“The fruit looks OK with a good apple and peach crop starting, which is always positive despite the weather,” Bassett wrote.
Indeed, fruit trees are doing so well that a newsletter from Lorraine Merrill, the New Hampshire commissioner of agriculture, reminded growers that they “need a plan for thinning those crops,” getting rid of many blooming peaches and apples before they grow too far, so they don’t damage the trees.
“If you don’t carefully thin, trees get into biennial bearing. Too big a crop saps the trees’ strength, resulting in a short crop the following year,” cautioned George Hamilton, Cooperative Extension fruit specialist, in the newsletter.
Which leads to an eternal truth of farming: There’s always something that’s a problem.
“Every year is going to be too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold for someone,” Majewski said.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
