May 21st

Sunday, May 21st, 2017

We had a meeting of the minds today.

For those of you who don’t know, Paul and I run a pick your own pumpkin patch. My family ran it when I was growing up, but as of last year it was passed on to us. Our first season was a VERY wet one. We would get five inches of rain at a time throughout the summer. It was so wet that we were picking pumpkins in September trying to bail them out of standing water so they didn’t rot. Unfortunately, this year is off to the same start.

In Minnesota’s climate, the best time to plant pumpkins for their growing cycle is late May to early June. Too early and your pumpkins don’t last until Halloween, too late and they may not have the chance to turn orange before the first freeze. So even though we knew the rain was coming last week, there was nothing we could do about it. We just had to pray that we’d end up on the lower end of rain potential.

Well, we were on the high end. Four inches later, we have standing water everywhere. So we met up with my dad today to talk through options. We already knew that we’re going to have to push back planting at least a week, and because of that, the corn more than likely won’t go in. By that time, it will be on the late end to plant sweet corn, and the neighboring field has field corn this year, not soy beans like we had planned for. Although cross contamination/pollination between corn is unlikely, we’re not sure that we want to risk the seed that we have.

We roll with the punches here at Dream Acres Farm.

All we can do at this point is leave it in God’s hands and hope that he’ll give us some good drying weather for the next 7-10 days. We’ll see what happens!