In the world of vegetbale production, there's never a shortage of education. Nature continues to surprise us and leave us with plenty of mysteries. Some of the surprises are good, some aren't so good and one of them has just plain been ugly.

I've always been one to deliver the bad news first so that is what I will do in this blog entry. North Star Farms will not have onions at farmers' markets this summer because we've already had a crop failure.

We were so excited about finally getting organic Walla Walla onions and had again planned the very popular red variety, Rossa di Milano. Unfortunately, the day I planted them, there wasn't enough moisture in the soil, if any, and even after watering them, the water evaporated quickly. The roots didn't get enough water and the young seedlings perished. There were roughly 1,300 plants.

It's too late to direct seed onions into the ground because we are less than a month away from the summer solstice. We could plant the seeds, but the onions wouldn't form recognizable bulbs. Oinions were a popular item last year and I'm just crushed that we won't be able to provide onions to our customers.

This includes about 350 leeks. We hadn't grown leeks in the past, but thought we'd give it a try this year. Unfortunately, the Varna variety succumbed to drought, just like the onions.

The good news is, we've got garlic popping up all over the place. We've heard from two reliable sources now that the top garlic producers in the region didn't get a crop, but ours is doing very well, thank you very much.

I don't know what we've done differently, but as I write this the day before Memorial Day, our garlic crop looks quite healthy and barring any natural disaster, we should have a yield that is at least triple what we had in 2007.

The ugly is the wind. This is partially responsible for sucking the life out of my onion plants and it's the one condition in North Dakota that many of us despise. The wind has been blowing since early April and it just doesn't seem to taper. Oh, we'll get a day here or there, but the norm seems to be 30 to 40-mile-per-hour sustained wind. Often times it's just brutal.

This wind has to stop so we can get back to enjoying North Dakota outdoors.