Yes, it’s the farmers’ lot to always be complaining about the weather. Yes, this year yet again, it has been a startlingly off year. Up until today, I don’t actually remember when we last had a good rainfall. On one hand, it has been easier to work on a variety of outdoor projects, but that’s not really worth the price paid to our landscapes and farm crops. With Christmas trees, sometimes it’s hard to predict just how hard the impact will be — that is, how many new transplants will succumb might not be evident until the spring. Most of the mature trees will be stressed going into the winter, but they should recover fine. Conifers shed needles in the fall under normal conditions as they rotate out old leaves to make room for new ones or discard less useful interior needles. It looks like they may have shed more needles this fall than normal as a tactic to reduce expiration of moisture, but that’s an anecdotal observation. By my farmer’s sense of weather metrics, I’m burning my brush pile extremely late in the year. Typically I’ll burn brush late spring to early summer, but I just kept putting it off feeling that it was too dry to burn. Sure, I probably could have gotten away with it, but I don’t have running water at the farm so I am very careful about fire in dry conditions. So, literally at the last minute just before we open for the season, I burned the biggest brush pile to clean up before everyone visits. Perhaps you can overlook the other piles still hanging around?
A note to Christmas tree customers: the drought will not impact your tree and likely not be obvious to you with one exception. It will probably drink up a lot more water in the first week than it did last year, so keep filling that tree stand.
