AS I WRITE these words, the sun peeks apologetically through broken clouds, like someone who's shown up late for an important appointment. The important appointment would be spring, whose arrival this year has been endlessly delayed. Pouring rain and wind and cold in May! We've been had; we should demand a refund. If only. Every now and again the clouds seem to disappear and the garden is flooded with warmth and sunshine, but then the wind rises, the clouds thicken, the light turns thin and gray, and one's briefly soaring heart plops back to earth – where it will soon be rained on yet again.

Of course, living as we do in a state of more or less permanent semiparchedness, we must be grateful for all water, no matter how awkwardly timed and inconvenient, for the day will surely come (again) when there isn't enough. As Gore Vidal put it (with respect to figs) in Palimpsest, his 1995 memoir, "There is either too much of everything here or nothing at all." Or Herb Caen, paraphrased from dim memory: The only time it rains enough here is when it rains too much.

Whining about late rain seems to be largely a city sport. Just across the Golden Gate Bridge, at Green Gulch Farm, the feelings are mixed but on the whole cheery. The April showers (showers? deluges) did leave the ground so wet that some potato plantings were delayed by a few weeks, according to director Emila Heller, "but we managed plantings of lettuces, broccoli, and kale in between storms."

The long-term consequences of the rain could include a late arrival, with gaps, for the potato crop and possibly a diminished overall yield (though "not necessarily," according to Heller), as there may not be the usual number of plantings. At the same time the spring storms have lessened the need for the farm to irrigate, which it does by drawing on a reservoir fed (like all Marin reservoirs) entirely by local runoff.

Heller thinks that produce prices probably won't spike, while noting that the farm's income might be affected simply by the farm's being unable to bring as much bounty to market as in less inclement years. But it's still early in the sunny season. And anyway there really isn't a sunny season at Green Gulch; it's a fog-belt operation whose crops, Heller says, "like some sun, but not too much." Rain, too: for everything there is a season. Let us hope that Nature finally gets the message so we can start looking forward to Green Gulch's potatoes, especially the Yellow Finns.

Paul Reidinger