Oakhampton farmer Austin Breiner has replanted after too much rain killed his crops

Now the Oakhampton Heritage Farm owner finds himself on the other side of the spectrum and has faced a new battle.

Large volumes of rain in November - which left low lying areas around Maitland flooded - destroyed all of his crops.

He was on the verge of a bumper cucumber season with many varieties flourishing, but they just couldn't cope with wet feet.

He has now replanted his summer crops and is also growing winter vegetables - that's right, in the middle of summer.

It's something unheard of around Maitland and was impossible just a couple of years ago.

Mr Breiner said the mix of heat and humidity - without the intense temperatures of the high 30s and even the 40s - had allowed him to raise a few kinds of winter vegetables from seed.

Some of them have already been planted out into the paddock and they are thriving.

"It's very strange," he said.

"It's something that would have been impossible a few years ago."

This means he will have a bumper winter crop in autumn, that is of course if there isn't too much rain or heat between now and then.

Mr Breiner's array of summer crops include coloured corn, tomatoes, Crystal Apple cucumbers, table queens, pumpkins and some golden nuggets.

His winter varieties include Romanesco and kale.

His Rosellas are also just starting to flower and he's hopeful to have some for the February 17 Slow Food Earth Market in The Levee.

"We've got clay subsoil here and once the topsoil gets saturated it has nowhere to go and everything turns into slush," Mr Breiner said.

"The water can't soak through it. When we got all of that rain you couldn't walk on it, you couldn't drive the tractor on it, all you could do is stand back and look at it.

"The subsoil is still so wet right now that any heavy rain that comes will wash the topsoil away, so we really don't want to see anymore heavy rain."

The Bureau of Meteorology is predicting the first half of the year will be wetter than average.

"It's even cooler and wetter than last summer," he said.

"They say the La Nina is peaking at the moment and they think over the next couple of months it will ease away and weaken.

"After two wet years this is Australia - the harshest of all the continents, and I think somewhere down the track either this year or next year we're going to have a really dry year again.

"But then again it could stay wet. In the 1950s it stayed wet year after year. It was the wettest decade since Europeans kept records."

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