For area farmers, summer rain is great. But this much?

London-area vegetable farmers are facing delayed harvest and lower yields after the rainiest July on record.

Matt Roberts, a farmer at family-owned Adelaide Farms, on Adelaide Street north of Eight Mile Road in Middlesex Centre, hopes to make up for losses as harvest progresses.

“It’s just one of those years. Usually, we have tomatoes coming out of our ears, but this year, not so much,” Roberts, 21, said.

Early tomato production suffered from the rainfall, Roberts said, which caused diseases that lowered yield and damaged quality.

“We have to really be picky with what we cut,” he said.

Batches of sweet corn turned out smaller than usual too, he added.

While tile drainage can remove excess water from crop rooting zones, little can be done to manage the drenched fields from heavy rainfall.

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London’s biggest single rainfall day this year was July 15, when the tail-end of Hurricane Beryl delivered 59.3 millimeters, beating the 1996 record for that date. The 44.7mm on July 16 also set a record for that date, beating the 43mm from 1988.

London soaked up 210mm of rain in July, smashing the local monthly record of 204.6mm, set in 1992.

Roberts says he can only wait until the rain is gone and the soil is dry.

“You can’t pick them (tomatoes, cucumber and green beans) when they’re wet, and when it’s wet for a week, it slows down what we can actually do,” he said.

With better weather and a bit more heat, there’s hope for later plantings of sweet corn and green and yellow beans. The success of the fall pumpkin season is also uncertain, Roberts said, and the wait until harvest in October seems long.

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“We’re having trouble with some of the plants starting to die off a little early,” he said. “So we’ll see how that affects the harvest for the pumpkins, but it’s hard to tell this early until we start picking.”

Consumers visiting the farm to buy fresh produce expect to find vegetables from all seasons, and educating them about the local growing season is part of the business, Roberts said. “We try to tell people what goes on and try to explain how things are going, and if things are going poorly, explain that, too.”

In Elgin County, the rain also hit farmers hard, making planting, weeding and harvesting harder.

“July was tough, and the soil was too wet, which was not healthy for the plants,” said Chris Devries, owner of Common Ground Farm, near St. Thomas.

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As for tomatoes, Devries grows them in unheated greenhouses to avoid fungal diseases caused by the heavy rainfall.

The “biggest problem” for Devries, also caused by too much water, is the abundance of weeds, and a short window of dry days for weeding and harvesting at the organic operation.

“I’d rather it didn’t rain too much,” Devries said. “But, you know, the right amount of rain is great, but when it goes past that, it gets really hard.”

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