Andy Mariani is tired of rain.
Andy Mariani is tired of rain.
“Even urbanites are getting tired of rain,” he said.
Since his family grows mostly cherries and apricots in Morgan Hill, Mariani has seen late rains cause havoc with the fruit.
“It’s really doing it to our cherry crop,” Marian said. “About 10 to 50 percent of cherries (in the area) are cracked, depending on the stage of (the fruit’s) maturity when the rains come. Greener fruit is not as susceptible.”
Apricots, he said, are badly affected cosmetically with cracks, spots and speckles, especially the acclaimed Blenheim apricots that his orchards produce.
“But I also grow peaches, nectarines and plums and so far they are fine,” he said.
Crops will have a chance to dry out over the rest of the week with partly cloudy to sunny skies and temperatures climbing to near 80 by Thursday. Lows will be in the 40s and 50s. Rain won’t return, forecasters expect, until next week.
Residents near Barrett School reported not only thunder but also hail Monday afternoon as the day was peppered with occasional heavy rains that left Morgan Hill with 22.83 inches of rain for the season and almost one half inch in a 24-hour period ending at 5:15pm Monday.
Strawberries are not happy with the rain either.
Thirty seconds after Pete Aiello got off the phone last week with a record-setting strawberry sale, he was informed by Uesugi Farm’s foreman that fields were too muddy for workers to harvest.
“We usually pick through any kind of condition, rain or shine, and this morning we were actually out in the fields, but it eventually got so bad …,” Aiello, the farm’s owner and sales manager, said Thursday.
He was forced to cancel that record-setting order of 3,000 flats of strawberries.
