Farming the Heat Waves

Farming the Heat Waves
Icy well water water sliding

A mild and fair spring can catch you with your pants down if you're not careful.  At market this spring when a good friend to the farm checked up on the start to our season...I told him that it felt like we had gotten away with something.  No tornadoes, hail, excessive rain, or late frost.  Something seemed to be missing...an extreme weather event.  When it seems as if there is no reliable weather pattern anymore, I would say that riding out a nerve-wracking torrential downpour or freak 13-degree May day is par for the course.

Well the curve ball came mid-June.  Within one ten-day forecast we could see two back to back heat waves with a little reprieve in between.  As per usual, we held onto a major grain of salt in regards to the weather man's predictions...it won't play out that way.  But then, as if to wish us the 'best of luck', Mother Nature sent us off into these ten days with a huge, heavy rain storm to give the ground a good soak.  The sun rose the next morning, igniting the fire in the sky that would warm us to what felt like Rich's bread oven...the one that Jack cowers from as he hangs out during Rich's sourdough baking, "it's too HOTTTT".  Grateful for that nice soaker, we had our irrigation at the ready to keep plants alive in such oppression.

Our little, efficient farmhouse-that-could utilized the air conditioning, offering us refuge and a sort of 'war room' from which we schemed how to move the sheep into the shade of the trees, irrigation rotation, and strategic harvesting during the late evening or early morning hours when the veggies had rebounded from heat stress.  It felt as if we were surviving it all until day two of mid-90's with inflated lows dropping only about 15 degrees into the 70's.  Our cooler that held all of our income for the week within couldn't keep up with the heat and overnight had come up to 50 degrees.  Back to the war room.  I packed May into the truck and headed into town to grab ice.  As it turns out, we were lucky to have power.  The light in town was out...and the small grocer where we deliver our goods.  No power and no generator.  On we went on the hunt for ice.

We pulled up to the gas station in town to see a very sweaty ice man loading bags of the stuff into the ice coolers.  We headed back to farm with a mountain of ice and filled cooler and tubs with it within our struggling cooler, setting the produce boxes on top.  We schemed to harvest the rest of the produce the morning of delivery so that it wouldn't need to be cooled for any length of time.  I moved all of the most tender produce into our home refrigerator and our old refrigerator that sits in the barn to be plugged in for emergencies.  Rich got to work, picking up another cooling unit to aid the one struggling in the cooler which had been more than enough until this string of scorching days.  

'Hot summer days' as May called them became her favorite as she discovered that moving the sprinkler next to her slide made a water slide.  Thankfully the kids were carefree and cool as Rich and I battled the sun.  Soon enough Rich was cutting a hole in the side of the cooler wall to install our second unit, running electric line and sweating doubly: sweating as a bodily necessity to moderate body temperature and sweating out stress.  And as the kids giggled in the background, adn the sheep panted in the field, hovering over the cool water refilled thrice a day, Rich powered on the second cooling unit and shut the door.  After a lunch break, checking on the cooler, it was just right...the two units turning on when the temperature rose above 43 degrees and then saving their energy until it rose once again.  

No doubt we made our favorite summer day treat to celebrate...leftover coffee from the morning pot blended with cool creamy milk, ice and a spoonful of coconut sugar until frothy.  And now we are a step closer to resiliency, having the ability to cool our goods by turning on that second unit if need be.  So for that second and almost identical heat wave, we could focus on irrigation, harvest, and sheep water, knowing that the fruits of our labor were safe and sound in the crispness of our cooler.  For us, it's all about little steps in the right direction as we can make them happen...next step, double insulating the floor in the cooler...and then one day solar panels on the barn to power the cooler and capture some of that very powerful energy from the sun!