Sometimes farming feels a little like playing catch with the weather, volleying back and forth in rhythm with an old friend. But then every once and a while the weather starts throwing erratically and pelting you with wild pitches. The downpours over the weekend had that kind of feel.

So this week the farm crew is scrambling to lob some pitches back, in the form of catchup work in the field that couldn’t be done in a downpour. Every day after morning harvest is done, we’ll be out in the Tomato fields getting caught up on trellising our early successions and pounding stakes in the ground to support future growth of our later successions. The stake and trellis system is the best way we’ve found to support our Tomato crops, but it’s pretty labor intensive and can only be done when the plants are dry (working with wet plants spreads leaf-surface diseases around in the field–no good!).

A few years ago we did a time lapse video of the stake pounding process for one of the Tomato fields, which is slightly hypnotic to watch. We wish 3 hours of work really could be completed in just the 56 seconds it takes in the video!