Sunshine

One of my kind of-sort of New Year's Resolutions is to get the farm blog up and running again.  Posts became pretty sparse last year until they just dropped down to nothing.  Part of the reason was that the clinic where I work opened another branch in August of last year and I was picking up extra days of work.  I'm still working a couple extra half days per month, but things have fallen much more into a set routine then they were at first.  Couple that with the incredibly (pardon my language) shitty year on the farm last year and it was getting too darn boring writing about mud all the time.  2011 was an interesting climatic ride to be sure.  We ended up breaking the record rainfall for the year by nearly a foot which meant our total rainfall for the year was a little over 2 feet above average.  So while all the crops in Texas and Oklahoma died in the drought, most of ours got drowned in the rain.  A few things did well.  The eggplant and kale and the mini cantaloupe did really well this year.  Everything else ranged from mediocre to non-existent.  Thank goodness I froze a lot of sweet corn in 2010 because we only had one planting of sweet corn that did any good in 2011 and I didn't freeze any of it.

Until you live on the leeward side of a large body of water, I don't think it is easy to comprehend how that body of water affects the local weather.  During the months November through February, our neck of the woods (to the lee of Lake Erie) only averages 3 sunny days per month and about 5 more per month that are partly sunny.  That means we only see the sun about 8 days each of the winter months.  And so January 2012 has been quite abnormal.  We did see about a foot of snow on January 2-3rd, but after that little system went through, the weather warmed up and the sun came out.  We actually had sunshine for 5 straight days in a row.   I should actually include a 6th day that started out with a beautiful clear sky sunrise before the clouds and the rain moved in a few hours later.  That is something practically unheard of in January around here.  So I figured that I better write that down in the blog because sometime in the future I will mention that we had 5 straight sunny or mostly sunny days in a row this January and no one will believe me.  Heck, I might not even believe myself.

But alas we are back to typical weather.  Rain today with cold and snow moving in tonight.  We still have kale and Brussels sprouts doing well in the garden and it looks like Mike may be out picking produce in the snow for this Saturday's winter market.  We will see what tomorrow brings.