Drought

Dry Creek living up to its name.

See that creek there?  It’s usually more like a small river.  Couple feet deep, 60 feet wide.  Flows and everything.  Now it’s reduced to unconnected pools of standing water.  Even those are evaporating fast.  We have 3 other creeks crisscrossing our property.  All of them are dry.  We have 2 wells.  Both of them are dry.  We have 2 ponds.  One is mud and the other has a few inches of muddy water left.  And we are lucky.  On the ridge above us they’ve been out of water for a lot longer.

I’m sure everyone has noticed, but it’s frickin’ hot.  It’s bone dry.  Basically, going outside is like stepping into an oven.  Man, I’m sure glad I have an office job where it’s air conditioned and I don’t have to go outside and haul hundreds of gallons of water everyday.  Oh, wait…

I don’t remember the last time it rained.  I know it hasn’t rained at all since we came back from San Antonio.  That was a month ago.  I’m not sure when the last rain before that was.  We’ve had dark clouds, thunder, lightning, and high winds, but no rain.  Mother Nature’s a tease.

We planted corn, squash, and beans a month ago.  About half up it courageously sprouted only to wither in the blast furnace we called June.  We probably won’t get any flour corn this year.  We’ll try planting some more squash if it ever rains again.

All our plants are struggling.  The corn that has sprouted (and every other farmer’s around here) looks like garlic – it’s short, pale green, and thin-leaved.  We lost the blueberry bushes we planted.  I’m lugging water to the apple trees every other day, but I think we’re going to lose at least one of them.  The hundreds of little pawpaws, redbuds, and Kentucky coffee trees that did so well in their first year are about to go belly up in year two.

The animals are pretty unhappy.  We’ve made more shade shelters for them and moved some into the barns. We’ve moved the cattle and goats underneath the trees.  We check water 3 or 4 times a day instead of twice.  But we can’t make the grass grow.  Check out our pastures:

The grass literally crunches when you walk on it.  If you kick the ground, the dust flies.  We’ve got about 10 days worth of grazing left, then we’ll have to resort to feeding hay in order to buy enough time for the rain to come and the grass to regrow.  In the meantime, we’ll have to keep using city water to bring to the animals.  That’s not a fun haul.  The creeks we usually get water from (knee-deep little tributaries of the large creek) are bone dry:

One of our “permanent” streams.

The weatherman has predicted a 40% chance of rain tomorrow and a 50% chance on Monday.  The weatherman has been wrong for weeks though.  We need a significant amount of rain so if you know any rain dances or chants, now’s the time.

What I want to be doing at this time tomorrow.