Soil Matters

Our field, right on the banks of the Connecticut River, has great soil and generally drains very well but it has a lot of standing water right now which doesn't happen very often. Generally soil gets grouped into three categories: sand, silt, and clay, depending on the size of the little particles. Sand is bigger, so the water runs through faster, making it drier. Clay is smaller pieces, so the water gets trapped and drains more slowly. Silt is in the middle. When you have a good mixture of the three it's called loam, which is what we have. When one particle size is a bit more dominant in the mix, for instance silt in our case, it's called silty loam (or sandy loam, etc).

When it rains a lot in a short time and our silty loam turns into old-fashioned mud, harvest vehicles get really stuck. I can't count the number of times we've gotten vehicles drastically stuck in the mud over the years, and had to pull them out with a tractor and a chain, sometimes in the still pouring rain. I've gotten better over the years at mitigating the risk, maintaining better farm roads, buying nobblier tires, using the right vehicle at the right time (vans and box trucks are great for fitting a lot of stuff in the back, but they get stuck more, while pickup trucks are better in the mud but don't hold nearly as many crates so you have make more trips). Our home base, where we wash the veggies and keep them cool, is not the same property as the field where we grow almost everything, so it all has to get transported about a mile from the field to home base. When it gets really bad and you just can't drive in the field at all, the last resort is a flatbed trailer on the back of a tractor (never gets stuck, but it's slow on the road and can't be driven by everyone).