The Rye is Green Like the Promise of Spring

The season is winding down like it started: wet.
It’s rained for ten days strait. The fields are soggy. The road is a river. We clear the drainage ditches and then we clear them again. And the road is still a river. There’s mold on everything. Everything. Mushrooms have sprung up in the most unlikely of places. Trees have fallen down. Frogs are everywhere.
We can’t plant. We can’t even walk in the fields. What’s in the fields already are succumbing to fungus. The leaves get black spots and then they get gooey.
That’s been the theme this year. I could have dated the above paragraph at any randomly selected timed over the past year and it would have been apropos. But the rye and some winter pea got seeded last Tuesday, the day before the rain came. It sprouted three days later, and is growing fast and green and lush. It’s growing like it doesn’t know that winter is coming. It’s growing like it’s getting plenty of water and doesn’t has a care in the world.
That’s a far cry from the past few years. In the past few years it’s taken ten days to get the winter rye to come up, and then it just sits there, barely above the soil, little red sproutlets waiting for water. It hasn’t put on any growth by the time it gets cold, and it just sits there, gradually dieing off until March when t puts on a pitiful little growth spurt. Not this year. This year it’s thick like the Everglades.. We’ll need it. We need to feed the soil this year like we never have before. The fields have been so wet and so waterlogged our bacteria drowned in the spring. The muddy soil became host to evil anaerobic bacteria, and the fields smelled like a sewer. I kid you not. A sewer. We dried out a bit in July/August, enough to turn the soil, enough to provide something of an environment for the desired aerobic bacteria, but the recolonization can be a slow process. We can’t do anything but provide some foodstuff, and that the rain is helping us do. The rye could very well be knee-high by Halloween. There’s a new alternative mantra for you. We’re puttin’ up hay for the actinomycetes and the earthworms. We’re layin’ in stores for the hyphochytriomycota and the oomycota. The rains came and the livestock got fed. It’s time to rest.