PROVIDENCE — Although a lot less rain fell in June than most people assume, the cloudy skies and dampness have created a “disaster” for the state’s strawberry farmers, Al Bettencourt, director of the Rhode Island Farm Bureau, said Thursday.

“I’ve never seen a season like this,” Bettencourt said. “It rained nearly every day in June, and it has been miserable, misty, cold. The plants need heat and sun in order to grow.” Conditions are so bad, he said, that he was unable to grow even zucchini, “Normally, you just throw it on the ground and it grows,” he said.

One crop that is flourishing, unfortunately, Bettencourt said, is blight.

“We’re getting a lot of powdery mildew and other kinds of diseases,” he reported. “It has just been too cold.”

He said backyard gardeners who bought their plants from chain stores are more likely to find blight affecting them than folks who bought local plants to grow.

But all of these dire consequences followed a June that was not particularly wet.

Charles Foley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said Rhode Island usually gets 3.38 inches of rain in June. This year’s total was 3.61 inches. “Everybody says we had a lot of rainy days, but we didn’t have any great gulleywashers.”

Kenneth Ayars, chief of the Department of Environmental Management’s Division of Agriculture, said, “It’s the combination of 30 days of overcast skies and relatively unsunny weather which is causing some issues. The heavy rains of the past two days will cause some washouts. It depends on the type of field and slope.”

Ayars said the crops most severely affected by the weather are hay, for animal feed, and strawberries. “Strawberries have been hit very hard,” he said.

He added that the weather is delaying the planting of other crops. “We will see what happens in July and August,” he said.

Wayne Salisbury, owner of the Salisbury Farm in Johnston, said, “The weather is killing me over here. You can’t do hay when it rains. We haven’t had three good days of weather for a month.”

Salisbury said he probably has enough hay for his own use, but he predicted that other farmers will have to import it from elsewhere.

As for his strawberries, “They’re starting to get waterlogged, but they are almost at the end of their season anyway,” he said.

Salisbury said the pick-your-own-strawberries tradition got clobbered this year.

“People stay home when it’s cloudy,” he said.

At the Jaswell Farm in Smithfield, co-owner Chris Jaswell said the farm is making out better than most.

“We’ve had pretty good luck because we are on dry ground here, but strawberries are the one crop that just doesn’t like rain. They are on the ground. There’s no relief for them. More of them rot than get picked.”

Jaswell said farmers are going to have to be diligent about spraying to keep blight down this year.

“If you get only four or five hours of sunshine, you need to get a fungicide down, and you’d better get out there,” he said.

But despite the weather, he said, people still showed up to pick strawberries. “In a normal year, people won’t come if it’s overcast,” he said. “But we’ve had people picking in the rain.”

tmorgan@projo.com