The smell after a rain on the farm is so magical and the farm has been asking for it since we’ve had a lot less rain this fall compared to the past two falls.

The last two years we got rain storms that brought in over five inches of rain in just a few days and the last couple of days was our most significant rain of this fall and it was less than half of that.

Since the rain started late Sunday we received 1.75 inches of rain on the farm which was more than what was forecasted for the area.

Although initially there were forecasts for another decent amount of rain today and tomorrow that has reduced to just a little bit today.

Outside of harvesting for the markets we are not doing any work in the field this week with it being muddy.

The last farmers markets of the year for us are this week with today’s and Saturday’s Davis Farmers Markets. After that we will be taking a break from both of those markets the last week of the year and all of January.

We are planning to return to the Saturday Davis Farmers Market February 3 and for the Wednesday market we anticipate being back March 6.

Not doing markets in the month of January will allow us to focus all of our attention on starting seeds for most of our spring and some summer veggies. We also will be preparing the necessary fields for our first transplants and direct seeded crops when the weather allows us to.

Over the last week we finalized our crop plan for the spring and summer which allowed us to order almost all of our seeds we need.

Most of what we are growing is staying the same from this past spring and summer with some necessary tweaks to different veggies and specific varieties.

There were a few veggies we tested out this year and will be increasing how many melons and summer squash we grow this year.

For a few other crops that we were disappointed in how they grew we are either changing the variety to see if that solves some of the issues there were or adjusting when we plant them by a week.

Two important varieties we grow, a yellow onion and Jimmy Nardello peppers, were out of stock so we have to wait until the new year to order them. Luckily we don’t need to be seeding either of them until the end of January so they should be here in time.

We are testing out a few new things this year and we’ll tell you about them once we get closer to when we harvest them.