No rain

[altivo]

Again. It's getting very dry here, grass is starting to turn brown. Rain was predicted for last night and this morning, but nothing happened. There were a few clouds, but it cleared up. The temperature dropped, though. Highs around 90F the last couple of days dropped back to 70 or so today.

Busy weekend on the horizon, with handspinning demos both days, one at a fair on Saturday and the other a sort of historical recreation at a heritage farm on Sunday.

Pulled out a stalled project (Tom Baker's Dr Who scarf) that was in my closet for years. Fortunately it was acrylic washable yarn, so no moths. Unfortunately, mice had chewed a couple of small holes at some point. Started wondering when and... By my calculation, this project was started between 27 and 28 years ago. It was about 75% complete and got interrupted. I think the interruption was our move from an apartment building where we had two apartments facing each other across the hall to our first house. That was 1985. Anyway, the mouse damage is repairable, and the scarf will be done soon as I'm a much faster knitter than I was in 1985. It's based on a pattern distributed by the BBC back in 1982, so it's the same huge long colorful thing that Baker used to wear. It was supposed to be for Gary, and will be. I'm just going to borrow it for a couple of days to use at IFC in August. :D

Comments

[lhexa]

Possibly useless, but I wanted to mention this easy irrigation tip: find your driest, most useless ground, and dig a small cylindrical hole. Stick a hose in and run it until the nearby ground is moist. The water will quickly dig the hole down to either bedrock or a big root. Repeat whenever the top layer of ground dries out. In the short term, this will make the area even more muggy and insect-ridden, but eventually the ground there will be moist enough that most of the water goes to the roots of nearby trees and brush. It being summer, the trees will slurp it right up and hasten their metabolism, thus their respiration as well. And in trees, respiration ain't nothing but tightly controlled evaporation. You can turn your entire plot into one wondrously efficient air conditioner.

It works in Texas. ^_^

[altivo]

We're on a glacial moraine. Digging here takes you quickly to gravel that drains straight down for 50 to 100 feet. If you don't go deep enough for the gravel, the clay-silt soil holds the water like a bucket and won't absorb it easily. We do really well with normal rainfall here that comes in small amounts of a half inch or so every few days. After a real drought, such as we had five years ago or so, the soil hardens like ceramic and takes a whole season to moisten again.

[lhexa]

Oh well! If you're willing to take such a harsh step, you could also kill off the grass and replace it with some kind of benign native brush. On mixed-use land, the drainage patterns tend to become chaotic and gridlike, dooming grass. Or you could just play Dwarf Fortress on a taiga biome until it gives you some crazy idea.

I say all of this knowing full well that you know more ecology than I do. :P

[altivo]

About a third of our land is already in native plantings, though somewhat degraded by alien incursions of mulberry or buckthorn. Most of the grass we have is pasturage for the horses, and I need it that way. It's a mix of weedy and native grasses with occasional thistle or dock that I'd rather be without but those are hard to eliminate. We control the unwanted stuff by keeping it mowed off mostly. (The horses won't eat thistles and I don't blame them. I suppose I could get a burro for that but our vet recommends against pasturing donkeys with the horses because of parasite interactions.)

[lhexa]

I stand by the Dwarf Fortress recommendation. Its chronically broken simulations are a wonderful aid to the imagination.