No rain

[greenstorm]

It's been a couple months since we had rain, rare up here. We still have a burning ban on -- campfires are allowed, but nothing bigger, no bonfires or anything larger than 1m x 1m. The ban was recently extended till the end of the month.

My soil is dust. I gave the south slope a good watering several weeks ago, but I think I'm going to need to water it, the mushrooms, and the rhubarb etc again. While it's good for plants to go into winter on the dry side -- the cells are less likely to burst when they freeze if they have a lower water content, so there's less freeze damage -- it's not good for them to go into a cold winter water stressed.

I've finally excluded the ducks from my garden space. Even the rhubarb is in rough shape. If I water it they'll destroy the soil by digging it all up for worms, so they got the boot. Now I need to spend enough time at home to move the sprinkler for a couple days; I've been in the office to help me focus on data entry for he tail end of this week.

Down on the coast the situation is pretty intense. At this time last year the coast got tremendously heavy rainfall which washed out a lot of the roads between here and there and flooded a ton of that, er, floodplain that makes up the fraser valley. Now it's very very dry. Normally there's a dry period in the summer and then the rains start; sixty days without meaningful rain isn't completely out of character for the area. All the drinking water is surface water, though, so there are tremendous dams which are supposed to recharge over winter, then hold a summer's worth of water. Unfortunately the summer is over and the rains haven't come yet. Agricultural water is being cut off, and I know at least one small outlying community is going to run out of drinking water by the end of the month.

My weather app has been drifting cooler and cooler very slowly, but we still have a steady stream of clear skies predicted same as we have the last couple months. It's making me lazy around an additional pig structure, getting my straw covered, and all that jazz but it is really nice for line-dried sheets and spending the last few hours of light-outside-work-hours outdoors.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

oof, that's hard, the water stresses. i think especially so when you're not used to it and don't have systems set up to deal with it, like drip irrigation for gardens and acess to subsurface water in general.

it is raining again here, another 3 days of overcast and drizzle. we must have your rain; it's very unusual weather for this time of year, which is normally brilliant blue skies and 70*F days.

[greenstorm]

I'm interested to see what survives, both in my garden and in the forest generally. Last year we had really unusually hot temperatures, which caused a heavy heavy cone crop in the conifers (Especially spruces) around here. I'm curious as to whether the dry + extra seed crop will be a stress with some mortality. I guess it depends on the winter.

On the plus side, my 8-hour round trip drive on Friday with the ducks is supposed to have rain and slightly below freezing temperatures for a lot of it. >.

[yarrowkat]

wheeee, that sounds fun. i hope it doesn't get icy!

[squirrelitude]

Elizapples mentioned that when it rains, the pigs go nuts rooting for earthworms. I guess it makes sense that the ducks would too!

[greenstorm]

Ducks are such filter feeders. They go nuts for any kind of mud.