Good morning 🤗👋!!
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How are things going there?
Here, as always at this time of year, with heat... A lot of heat...
But since I don't want to complain about the heat all the time, today, for a change, I'm going to complain about something contrary: excessive rain and hail⛈️.
Now seriously, today I'm going to tell you how hail, or even rain, can be a headache for farmers, and can even leave you without your favorite fruits and vegetables😰.
Let's start with the most obvious, hail🧊.
In the city, hail is not particularly problematic; the worst it can break is a windshield, and they are already designed to withstand these impacts.
However, in the countryside, we are not so lucky, because even a small ice ball is enough to knock small fruits off the tree, as happened with Alex's cherries last week:
As you can see, even if it doesn't knock them off the tree, the impact can be enough to damage the produce.
This is a very serious problem because it is very difficult to predict, and it can wipe out entire plantations in the worst cases.
However, even if it doesn't usually ruin the crop directly like hail, rain can also interfere with harvesting.
Last week, we started with Antonio's blackberries:
However, you might have noticed that shortly after they became available, they were gone.
You might have thought that other people beat you to it when you checked, and that it was due to limited stock.
While this is often the case when a crop is unavailable, sometimes it's more complicated.
For example, last week it had rained, and while other plantations cover their plants with plastic, the mesh you can see in the photo above is made of metal, and although it is very versatile and reusable, these meshes only protect the bushes from wind and hail, not from rain.
But why would rain be a problem? And since it is a problem... can it never rain for planting blackberries😱?
Well, to clarify these doubts, we spoke directly with our fellow farmer, Antonio.
He told us that if left in a humid environment, blackberries rot very quickly due to the presence of fungi and other microorganisms.
Since we don't use any pesticides or fungicides on our products, we cannot ship them when they are wet, as between the humidity and the darkness of the box, this fungus has the perfect conditions to proliferate and eat your blackberries before you have a chance to sink your teeth into them.
I still say we could put the blackberries in a lettuce spinner and dry them by hand, but if we do that, what you might get at home is a blackberry smoothie, so when it rains, it's better to let them dry in the sun on the plant😅...
What do you think?
That's all for today. Let's hope the rain and hail give us a break.
Have a beautiful week!
