Failure and Adjustments

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.

I was forced to stop irrigating fairly early in the summer due to the pond being too low to continue. It still, in November, has not risen back up to a comfortable level. I watched as one thing after another succumbed to the drought and the heat, including some newly planted trees. I was thankful the potatoes put in most of their growth before the heat started, and we will still get maybe half of a normal harvest from those. A couple rows of butternut squash (Thankful For … Butternut Squash) did better than the rest – part of my original reasoning for allowing open pollination between different varieties, what we call landracing – but still in this hot dry year they only produced a few meager fruits. A couple test rows of broomcorn sorghum seemed to not even notice the devastation around it, and I will be dedicating a much larger growing area to it next year. I was especially thankful for the flowers – which were a first for me as I had always focused on food before – putting a fresh bouquet on the table (pictures throughout post) was a wonderful morale boost through the first half of the year, and the zinnias and sunflowers actually did come back for the last couple weeks before the killing frosts once again set in.

We will see next year how many trees were truly lost, rather than just went into dormancy early to protect themselves. There is a lot we will see next year. I hope and pray that this year was an anomaly, and that this Appalachian valley will get right back to the normal that we have all lived up until now, but I fear that it is a distinct possibility that this may be the new normal. I am forced to believe it will be, to help prevent future disappointment, which means I will only lean harder into the development of sustainable agriculture on this site – shifting the ratio of perennials to annuals, focusing on forestry, growing deeper more fertile soil, and planting only the most resilient species which can care for themselves in whatever circumstances.