photo credit: Marc Albert/KRCB
Bartlett pears ripen on a tree near Sebastopol

With the harvest full moon lighting up the skies last night, it's an opportune time to check in on the agricultural bounty being reaped around the region, as another growing season winds down. 

You'd think after a wet winter, and with plants so dependent on water, farmers and farmworkers must be gathering epic yields.

Turns out, that's not really the case. At least according to Evan Wiig with the Community Alliance with Family Farmers.

"A lot of folks, especially those growing annual crops, things like fruits and vegetables, got a real late start. They weren't able to get into their fields without getting their tractor stuck, it was just too waterlogged, or we had some of those frosts, and so what ended up happening was a lot of summer crops that would be going in around May, didn't really get into the ground until June or July, and so a lot of crops like squash and melon and of course tomatoes had a much later start. In some sense, on some farms, it was a pretty tough, tough, tough start to the season," Wiig said.

Some growers, Wiig says, did their best to adjust.

"We saw a few farmers who actually skipped their spring crops because it was so late by the time they could finally get into the ground that it was close enough to start putting in summer crops," Wiig said.

The owner of a small apple orchard near Sebastopol complained his apples are smaller this year, and mold issues have been worse.

With some crops delayed by weeks, farmers, known for perpetual optimism, are looking uneasily at their calendars, Wiig observed.

"An early frost is definitely always a concern. Obviously we have a lot of microclimates here in the North Bay. For folks who are in those cold pocket valleys, there's a lot more concern about an early frost. We haven't seen any risk of that quite yet, but it's certainly on everyone's mind, especially those looking at those late ripening crops," Wiig said.