The good kind of blues

Olliver Ramirez-Sanchez tries to keep cool as he picks blueberries at Dan’s Farm and Country Market near Saanichton on Tuesday. The recent spate of warm weather has been a mixed blessing for farmers, being tough on raspberries, but ideal for blueberries and watermelon.

Days of hot weather have brought challenges to the farming community, with things ripening much faster than normal.

Saanich Peninsula farmer Dan Ponchet said he does his best to keep up with the pace.

“So much of it comes on at one time,” he said. “We anticipated it being a little bit more gradual.

“That’s the nature of farming, you have to take the good with the bad.”

And there is always something positive happenening, Ponchet said. “At least we’ve got watermelon,” he said with a laugh.

The first ones were picked Tuesday.

He has a good crop of blueberries, as well, that has been keeping three people picking daily.

But the run of hot days, with temperatures five to 10 degrees above average, is set to come to a halt as the weekend approaches. Expect clouds to start forming today, leading to a chance of rain Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

Until then, Ponchet said his 0.8 hectare of sweet potatoes in particular is on a growing binge.

“They just positively love this kind of heat,” he said. “It’s the best thing for them.”

He said that’s not quite the case with other crops, such as raspberries, although their season is basically finished now.

Ponchet has been watering every second day during the hot streak, especially young plants.

“They’ve got to be watered very frequently in this type of temperature.”

He is also looking past the summer.

“We just planted our winter kale and we’ll be planting our winter broccoli and cauliflower early next week.”

A cooling trend would help with that, he said.

Environment Canada meterologist Armel Castellan said temperatures are due to “tumble down” to the normal range, about 20 or 21 C.

“We might even see the weekend be slightly below that,” he said. “Right now we don’t have a huge amount of certainty with how much rain is going to come.

“It looks like it will be more humid, certainly more cloudy and a little bit of rain.”

The change in weather could keep temperatues down through next week, Castellan said.

“It looks like we have a bit of a pattern keeping things lower or at normal until around the 10th or so of August.”

That should be followed by another string of above-normal temperatures, he said.