How will your garden grow? Wet, wild weather has Bucks County growers hoping for the best

Mother Nature has been a drama queen this year, giving us a cool, dry spring, followed by a warm, humid, rain-filled summer. Farmers, landscapers and home gardeners — and their plants — are all feeling her fickleness.

Milford farmer Matt Mood notes there's an old saying, "Corn should be knee high by the Fourth of July."

Mood wasn't sure his crop would make it to that milestone this year, with the arid spring keeping his corn and beans from sprouting like they should.

Then, over the past few weeks, the weather grew hot and and humid, as heavy rainstorms rolled in.

"The corn grew and jumped," Mood said. "It's beautiful. The corn and beans are doing much better ... They like the heat and humidity and the water."

How about tomatoes in Bucks County fields?

But tomatoes? Not so much.

"The rain we're getting is very hard on the tomatoes," he said, as they crack and rot from too much water.

So do the zucchinis and cucumbers. Fungi become problems for some vegetable plants when the weather gets too wet.

Bucks County vineyards need to air out

Grapes can succumb to fungal infections as well if they don't get a chance to dry out between rainstorms.

At Buckingham Valley Vineyards, Foreman Mark Hart said this spring he planted 2,000 new vines and had to water them to keep them from dying in the drought-like conditions.

"But now Mother Nature flipped the switch and now it's hot and raining a lot. It's not the rain that's the problem; it's the humidity," he said.

Too much moisture in the air isn't good for plants.

He's closely watching the grapes. Because they are still small and growing, there's room between them to dry out, but later in the summer, they will be so plump and packed together in clusters that too much rain could cause fungi to set in, Hart said.

The 20-acre Buckingham Valley Vineyards on Route 413 sells about 200,000 bottles of wine a year, said its shop manager Briana Whalen. That includes 26 different types of wine, including sparkling and port varieties.

At nearby None Such Farm in Buckingham, co-owner Karen Yerkes expects a great crop of corn this year, though it's a little late in coming. "This is wonderful heat for the sweet corn."

She's hoping the rainy weather will ease up before the farm's pumpkins grow heavy and hit the ground. When it's muddy, they can rot.

"Pumpkins don't like a lot of water," she said.

Home gardening grows

Yerkes said the farm sold a lot of plants earlier this year to home gardeners. She thinks recent inflation has more people trying to grow their own produce.

At the Penn State Extension Service - Bucks County, Horticulture Extension Educator Margaret Pickoff agrees.

"Food costs are a lot higher and people are spending more time at home," she said.

She said interest in gardening has really picked up over the past few years and the extension's master gardeners have been busy helping people with questions on how to grow specific plants and how to protect them from insects and fungi.

More: Master gardeners offer advice at Middletown Grange Fair

Pickoff doesn't want to see the rainy spell go away, but that the precipitation will come down more gently.

"We need the rain," she said. "I just hope it's more evenly distributed throughout the season."

The Penn State Agricultural Extension Service for Bucks County is located at 576 Penns Park Road, Newtown, PA 18940. The office is open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The website for the Master Gardener Hotline is https://extension.psu.edu/programs/master-gardener/counties/bucks/hotline

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Bucks County farmers feeling the heat - and rain - of fickle weather