Anonymous Appalachian Agrarian

This year was an interesting year. I began an entirely new garden project of slightly over half an acre, planted dozens of apples, pears, hazelnuts, and mulberries, a dozen or more grapes, and a dozen blueberries. I brought in 60 yards of mushroom soil and half that of wood mulch, dug and planted six 5′ by 80′ beds of grains, vegetables, flowers, and herbs. I fenced it all in to keep the deer out, set up a gasoline pump to irrigate from the pond (The Farm Pond), and then over the rest of the season watched most of it fail miserably regardless of any efforts on my part.

Central Pennsylvania generally has a mild climate, and doesn’t usually see extremes of any kind except rarely in small doses. We have seen hot, dry summers, the remnants of hurricanes, briefly flooded valleys, late frosts that partly ruin flowering tree crops. This past year we had a dry winter, receiving a total of 6″ of snow for the whole season. In February we had multiple weeks of 60F weather, and in May had frosts down to the low 20s. We had a drought that wouldn’t quit, and a single day of 2″ of rain that just washed everything away instead of soaking in. Now in November, digging to plant garlic has uncovered that the soil is still bone dry. Local farmers exclaimed that in living memory nothing of the sort had ever happened here before, and these farmers are old enough that they should have retired decades ago. Harvests were devastated, many fields were written off as a loss and destroyed, some remain unharvested. Even hay crops were pitifully thin, portending a lean winter to come and thinning of herds on many farms.