Each week we provide our CSA members with a mix of the abundance growing on our farm. Soon, you may be receiving questionable mushrooms and bullfrogs in your CSA shares, as these are the things that are abundant on our farm after 10″ of rain in one month!

I have never seen so many mushrooms growing on our farm, and now we have an amazing bullfrog population in our ponds.

Unfortunately not everything is doing as well as the frogs and the mushrooms. The soils in Colorado typically have a lot of clay and clay (unlike sand) holds onto water. The soils in our fields are saturated and with the daily rainfall, the fields aren’t getting a chance to dry out. Many of the plants are showing signs of extreme stress after the roots have been sitting in water for weeks. Spinach leaves are turning yellow and rhubarb leaves are turning red (they should be dark green!!).

A few of the plants are doing alright. The peas and fava beans seem to be loving the cool, wet weather. The garlic is holding up, but I wonder how long the bulbs will be alright sitting in pools of water.

The water just doesn’t have anyplace to go. The water table is at (or above!) the ground surface in many areas in our fields. The things that are already planted aren’t happy. The farm workers are exhausted from wading through the muck. And we can’t get into our fields to plant anything new.

The dogs are happy to wade through what used to be our farm roads. But our farm trucks are really suffering. Our farm roads are now world-class mud pits. This will result in some expensive repairs on the suspension, etc. And it will be difficult and expensive to turn the mud pits back into roads once things dry out.

Wyatt and Javier have been digging trenches all through our fields to try to move some water. It is working to some degree in that you can see water flowing through the trenches. But we keep having daily downpours that just fill everything back up with water.

Things I never thought I would see on our farm:

Lush ferns growing along our irrigation ditches and an actual fairy ring of mushrooms.

This spring has been a wild ride. Who knows what the rest of the summer will bring. We just have to cross our fingers and hope for the best!