Excess rain affecting local spring crops

MEDWAY, Mass. — A couple of weeks ago, the Medway Community Farm dodged a bullet when a hailstorm passed just north of its growing fields. But Farm Manager Todd Sandstrum said he knows of another farm that lost 75 percent of what it planted.

“Hail can literally cut through salad greens, through plants and just pulverize them,” he said.

That hail was accompanied by something the MCF didn’t see much of last year: rain. The problem is just the opposite this spring — and you can see it in the crops. Sandstrum explained that excessive rainfall was responsible for the two ugly radishes in his hand. On one side, the radishes looked fine. On the other, their skins ruptured outward.

“That’s a result of too much water and the plant growing so fast that it actually blows open,” Sandstrum said. “It’s one of those things where you don’t see what’s happening below the soil and you hope that everything’s going well.”

The ugly radishes, by the way, are still edible. But plants developing rot at their base — including some tomatoes and peppers — may never produce anything edible. That problem, known as ‘damp off’, is also a by-product of too much rain.

But it’s not just the precipitation that’s slowing things down on the farm. Temperatures have been rather cool, too — bad news for heat-loving vegetable plants such as peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes.

“The plants are trying to figure out which way to go,” Sandstrum said.” And right now, a couple of really good warm days will definitely help.”

And it might seem puzzling that, in the age of global warming, this spring has been so cool. According to NOAA, Boston’s average temperature this May, 60.1 F, is half a degree lower than last May’s average.

“There’s a lot of fluctuation that occurs with climate change,” said Christopher Golden, Associate Professor of Nutrition and Planetary Health at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Although there are going to be areas that get wetter in some years and drier in others, there are fairly persistent patterns that are occuring throughout the U.S. and throughout the world of temperatures becoming hotter and hotter.”

In other words, regional extremes cannot tell the complete climate change story.

But the lack of consistency makes farming, these days, especially challenging.

“We still have so much soil prep to do and the soil needs to be a certain moisture before we can work it with the tractor,” Sandstrum said.

Periods of rain are expected pretty much through the weekend — and if this weather pattern persists, it will affect this year’s harvest.

“I think some of our summer crops are definitely going to be delayed,” Sandstrum said. I think we’ll see a slower bounty coming in. Where we’re used to tomatoes really coming in full force, end of July and August, that may be pushed back a couple of weeks.”

But Sandstrum is trying not to look too far into the future when it comes to the weather.

“Right now, for me, it’s week by week that I try to focus on,” he said.

Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts.

Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW

©2023 Cox Media Group