Let It Rain. Just Not Too Much.
Tracey Vowell's Seasons of Change on the Dry Start to Corn Season
In This Issue
• Tuesday’s Chicago Region Markets
• Let It Rain… Just Not Too Much (Three Sisters Gardens’ Seasons of Change)
• Lincoln Square Deal With Bachalaash Platform
Tuesday’s Chicago Region Farmers Markets
Accuweather.com forecast: Times of clouds and sun; p.m. storm possible, high 78
Weather.com forecast: Sun and clouds mixed; stray p.m. t-storm possible, high 76
Fox Lake Farmers Market, 17 E. School Ct., Fox Lake, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Lincoln Square Tuesday Market, W. Leland & N. Lincoln Aves., Chicago, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.
SOAR (Streeterville) Farmers Market, 226 E. Chicago Ave., Chicago, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Sycamore Farmers Market, 403 Edward St., Sycamore, 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Let It Rain… Just Not Too Much
A Three Sisters Garden Seasons of Change Story
Tracey Vowell of Three Sisters Garden in Kankakee is a frequent contributor to Local Food Forum’s Seasons of Change farmer series. Her farm is best known for its sweet corn, for years a popular feature at Chicago’s Green City Market and now home-delivered along with her other products following a pivot she made during the COVID complications last year.
Given that many people anxiously await the arrival of Three Sisters’ corn, I thought it would be a fun feature to post photographic progress reports to track the crop’s growth. Tracey obliged, but the photo made me gasp a little: Though the plants looked healthy, the soil — after a spring with unusually little rain — looked so dry! This prompted me to ask if she could write about what this means, and she quickly shared the following article.
Tracey reports that the situation, while not optimal, is not critical at this point… and better than the flooding spring rains that plagued the region in several recent years. (Some more good news… It rained Monday in Kankakee and the National Weather Service forecast shows a chance for rain or thunderstorms every day the rest of this week.)
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Last spring, we were inundated with rain. So much so that one of my home delivery newsletters included the math, bringing light to the realities of excessive rainfall Much to my delight, these numbers were later used by Debra Shore, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago, in her newsletter.
We had more than 10 inches of rain two weeks in a row, and it heartily set back every single crop we had growing in the field or waiting for transplant. It went something like this:
An inch of rainfall on an acre of land is 27,154.3 gallons. I found this to be a difficult measurement to get my head around, so knowing that a gallon of water is 8.3 pounds, an inch of rainfall on an acre is fast approaching 230,000 pounds.
Remember that at the time we were talking about 10 inches a week, not one inch, on my little 10-acre parcel, bringing us to a grand total of over 22 million pounds of water, two weeks in a row. Once I got past the spectacle value of trying to imagine these quantities, which was not easy, I realized that I had lost massive amounts of fertility, soil texture, seeds and plants.
Things drowned, washed away or just plain gave up in the face of the unceasing torrents. My soil was saturated and pounded tight by all the rainfall. I think it was late May and we started all over again with most things, and ran late with almost every crop throughout the season. Some crops just fell to the wayside because it was just too late to start over.
What a difference a year makes. Looking at this year’s first corn photo, taken about six weeks after planting this year, the ground does look dry, because it is. We are light on rainfall in many places this spring and it does bring a different set of problems. The capillary action in the soil falls to nothing as the soil dries and along with the lack of available water, nutrients eventually become unavailable as well, stunting growth, stressing plants, inviting pests and disease like a howling beacon.
For most things, we use drip irrigation, which is very efficient, but takes time and we can only run so much of the field at a time. Eventually we are chasing the dry-through areas of the field in a losing race, leaving the wish for rain as the magical reset button, even if it does come with a certain amount of trepidation these days.
The sweet corn is under overhead irrigation this year, so the water will fly from above, bringing its own weed and disease issues. But on the scale that we produce sweet corn, our physically largest crop, it is the only way.
I would be lying if I said I am not nervous about the season this year. So far, we are tending towards dry, but it is not extreme. Weather has not been friendly these last few years. It’s actually more like the reveal of a substantial shift that has taken place in the 22 years I have owned this piece of ground, making the growing game quite a bit more unpredictable and complicated.
At the end of the year, when totals come out, temperature and rainfall averages become conversational fodder, and I always find myself thinking about the same thing. The Law of Averages is always in play, and it obscures so much of what is really going on.
If it is a great year, with rainfall, sunlight and temps working for us, the totals usually fall right in the middle. If it is a really wet spring, all the plants are shallow rooted and accustomed to never being thirsty, but the rain will stop eventually, and we will go dry, bringing those pesky totals for the year right back into the middle.
When plants are unable to dig deep enough to find the moisture and nutrients, yields will fall, and we will chase water around this farm unceasingly. Still, at the end of the year, when those conversations start, it is not far off of an average year.
Now, with a dry spring, we water early, but not a lot. We want those plants to reach down and out with well-established root systems, the hope being that they will reach what they need, so that when the water does come, and it will, the plants are developed enough to withstand the onslaught at the surface and find their appropriate nutrients well below.
Of course, at the end of that year, we are still not far from average. We want to quantify so much, like an inch of water a week is enough for most crops. That is not to be mistaken for the idea that 20 inches in May will be enough to get us through the season, even if the math says it was an average year.
For us, this season is off to a dramatically different start from the last few. It makes me both hopeful and afraid. It could be great, and that is what we are focused on. Well, that and doing our part to balance our new realities against the ever-present Law of Averages.
Three Sisters Garden delivers a wide range of delicious produce plus flowers to homes in Chicago. Visit their website to learn more and to place an order.
Lincoln Square Deal With Bachalaash Platform
Editor’s note: Local Food Forum is happy to share community members’ recommendations for products and services. The following article — about the Bachalaash online community marketing and fundraising platform — is by Nicole Benjamin, Director of Special Events for the Lincoln Square Ravenswood Chamber of Commerce and its Lincoln Square Farmers Market. As Local Food Forum has not experienced the Bachalaash service, the opinions are those of the author alone.
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Is your farmers market looking for a simple, easy-to-manage way to fundraise? Check out what Bachalaash and its digital platform has done for us at the Lincoln Square Ravenswood Chamber of Commerce and our Lincoln Square Farmers Market.
We brought our Friends of the Market initiative to them, and they created the platform to help rally the community around supporting the local farmers market —by driving digital commerce and raising funds for community initiatives at the same time.
Based on our experience, we commend Bachalaash as a one-stop solution to help solve the ‘shop local’ challenge for all communities across our city. Bachalaash offers multiple options for community organizations like ours to create and manage a digital marketplace for their local businesses while raising money at the same time.
This platform offers local small businesses a cost-effective form of multichannel customer acquisition, while providing consumers a simple and direct experience to shop local and support their community. Driving consumers to one platform to support the community marketplace is just one click away.
Bachalaash has recognized this need to revive our connections to our communities by creating a platform to support the local small businesses. As we slowly approach a post-COVID world, the changes and challenges are just now coming into focus.
The way we work has changed. Where we work has changed. Our personal and work lives have shifted and become intertwined. We have become more isolated and less connected to our communities and networks. And it has become obvious that post-pandemic, we need to reconnect and rebuild our lives and our local communities in a big way.
We must strive to support community-driven commerce in our local neighborhoods, and this platform does it quickly and easily! If you are a community-based organization seeking a technological solution to support your community members by keeping dollars local while supporting your fundraising efforts, Bachalaash should be on your list of people to connect with. Contact them at hello@bachalaash.com.