Rain! Rain! Go Away!!!

Oooh!  With a bold title like that, I probably just cursed our farm with another several weeks of rain!

The rain has been nearly non-stop this season and it has created several challenges in the orchard!  We've not been able to get out and spray when we need to and as a result we have some pretty serious disease out there.  It looks like we've lost the majority of our Gala, Jonagold and Braeburn crops this year.  The one that hurts the most is the Galas.  They are our biggest producer.  Time will tell, but right now, it isn't very promising.

When the Apple Farmer went out for his last spray, he commented the next morning that he hadn't ever tried to spray in so much water.  He left ruts in places we've never had ruts!

Now, in California, when the earth moves, we all rock and roll!  In Missouri, when the earth moves, it literally picks up and leaves!  Thats exactly what has happened to our drive way, as well as other areas of erosion!  But just down the highway a couple of miles, some neighbors of ours have lost a good percentage of their farm.  This land has gone the way of this little fork of the Grand River!  This picture was taken just a couple of days after they burned the house down.  It'd sure be a problem for our little bridge if the house decided to up and leave too!

You might be able to see in this photo, but the farm was planted in beans and a good portion of those have gone away too!

The Orange pipes are the phone lines since the poles headed south a couple of weeks earlier.  The porch to the house is only a couple of feet from the river's edge now.  Used to be 30-40 feet away.  Used to be lots and lots of tall trees, but you can already guess where they went about a month ago!

We've had quite a bit of dammage along our ditches and seasonal creeks.  Sometime last week this tree went down and as we went to check it out we noticed a half a dozen live trees that had been blown over by the winds when the ground became super saturated!

Problem is, we really need rain since we have no means of irrigating in the orchard, so its hard to be ungrateful after our first three years of sparse rain and dinky little apples in the fall!