Drought hits Farmers' Market

Take severe heat, add a lack of rain, and you get crops and garden plants dying for a drink.

Producers at the Pittsburg  Farmers’ Market managed to put out  some fine looking tomatoes, onions, beets, zucchini and other squash, eggplant and cantaloupe on Saturday, but they had to work harder to do it.

“The first thing my wife Sandy does every morning is to turn on the spigot in the garden to water the plants,” said Bob Golay of Golay Gardens. “Then she moves the soaker supply line here, and moves the soaker supply line there. That’s her life all day, but if she didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have anything.”

Darren Swartz, Walnut, noted that it’s necessary to use more water to irrigate his plants.

“But even then, it (the heat)  beats up on them, and when you go out to harvest, then it beats up on you,” he said. “It’s like going to the gym for 12 hours. Everything is harder in the heat and the dry.”

Swartz said that his sweet corn is planted in a place where he doesn’t water, so it’s on it’s own.

“I didn’t bring any sweet corn to the market today because I just didn’t like the way it looked,” he said. “We’ll probably just freeze it. But I do see other vendors here today who have good sweet corn.”

Water isn’t always enough to beat the heat, according to Carl Flora.

“A lot of times when it gets up to 100 degrees, even if those plants are standing in water they won’t do any good,” he said.

Susan Mitchell of Sunshine Farms, Weir, doesn’t like using what she calls “town water” on her garden.

“It just doesn’t grow as well as rain water,” she said. “Rain water adds nutrients to the soil and makes healthier plants. I usually have landscaping plants, but even watering them they’re just having a hard time. Even my cone flowers, a drought-hardy native plant, look dreadful.”

Mitchell said that if it does rain, her landscaping plants should perk up.

In the meantime, she’s compensating by doing more crafts for the market.

“I’m also making pies to have something else to sell,” she said.

The growing season was advanced by around two weeks or so this year, and Parsons area grower Kim Weyhrich said that this has been an advantage.

“Drought is never good, but everything was early this year,” she said. “I don’t think we had tomatoes until July last year, and this year I had them at the beginning of June. I’ll have cantaloupe here next week, and I see somebody else already has some this week.”

However, some of her vegetables are suffering.

“Tomatoes will get soft in the field out in the sun before they’re ripe enough to pick  them, and the cucumbers definitely don’t like this weather,” Weyhrich said.

She added, however, that watermelon and cantaloupe will do well just as long as they get enough rain early in their growth process. It may even be better for them not to get too much moisture later on.

“You don’t want too much rain on them as they ripen, because it kind of waters them down inside and they won’t be as sweet,” Weyhrich said.