Local farmers have needed to contend with late crop harvests going into the summer due to unusual weather this past June.
“We had a cold and very wet spring, that’s fact,” John Hand, owner of Hand Melon Farm, said. “As far as our farm’s concerned, it delayed our strawberry crop by nearly two weeks.”
Byron Winney, owner of Winney’s Blueberry Farm, said “everything is affected by that kind of weather.”
He explained that both the temperature and moisture were problematic. By having too much water, the crops become more susceptible to fungal infections. When the weather is too cold, pollinators like bees simply stay in the hive or only pollinate the closest plants.
Additionally, he said that blueberries in particular pose another problem, because the plant’s flower is bell-shaped, and so has a narrow entrance that honeybees have problems with.
“Dairy farms are taking a real hit,” Winney said. “They just haven’t gotten all of their crops in yet. It’s the turn of July and they haven’t gotten their corn in, some of them.” Winney then called out to one of the workers, Trish, and asked whether her father had finished planting their corn yet. She responded that they had finished around June 29, about
two weeks later than normal. “And the expression is field corn should be knee high by the fourth of July,” Winney commented. Hand said that strangely, while his strawberries were two weeks late, his blueberries were pretty
much on time for some reason. “My thought on that is that the strawberries have straw mulch applied to them for the winter,” he said. Once the winter is over, they removed the straw mulch from the plants and put it between the rows of crops. Hand said that he thinks that it may have insulated the soil, keeping it colder for longer.
“The blueberries, even though the have mulch with wood chips around the base of the plant, they didn’t seem to have their roots insulated as much as the strawberries did,” Hand said. “I expect we’re going to start harvesting blueberries within the next week or so. And I expect we’re going to have sweet corn in the next week or so, and again that’s about a normal schedule.”
Another cause for the difference could be the environment of the farms. Hand said that his farm is on the ancient Battenkill river delta, which makes the soil sandier than normal.
As a result, Hand said “in spite of the excessive rain this spring, we were able to get out and onto the land when we needed to and do our tillage operations and get our crops put in at a pretty normal schedule.”
However, he added that due to the sandy soil, the farm also needs to be irrigated heavily and that even now it is dry.
Meanwhile, Winney said that his farm has a naturally high water
table, to the point that across the street is almost a swamp. He said he’s also next to a river and that there are various underground streams flowing beneath the farm, so they only have a few dry spots.
Currently, Winney said that they are picking Early Blue, one of the farm’s 23 varieties of blueberries. Winney said that in the week, they should start picking another two or three varieties, and another two or three the following week, then four or five the week after that.
“We should be swimming in berries right now,” he said. “But because of the spring, we’re not.”
For more information, call John Hand at 518-527-0072, or Winney’s Blueberry Farm at 518-695-5547.
