Hello Summer

It sure feels like summer has been here for awhile in N. Texas. It's a bit surprising to me for some reason that today is only the first day. The temperatures and dryness levels are the normal we usually see in July and August. But for today we get a reprieve. We're only suppose to get to a high on 91 degrees today and that will feel amazingly nice, especially with the 1/2 inch of rain we got early this morning. Hopefully the plants are refreshed and we will continue to see more rain through tomorrow night. Here's to hoping! High fire risk alerts are all around us right now. The wind has been really strong and hot over the past week, causing everything to dry out at an alarming rate. I've been manning the water hose trying to keep everything alive around here. I'm not going to complain though because we are actually in better condition here than most of Texas. Ranchers are selling off cattle left and right because there isn't any grass growing for them to feed on. Lakes are way down in most of the state where many residents depend on for drinking water. So any rain that comes is way more than welcome here! http://sslarcims.tamu.edu/website/kbdi/viewer.htm According to the Keetch-Byram Drought scale, we are in the green area which is hanging on by a thread to stay out of the drought conditions. One more step on the scale and we'll be there. Hopefully with a bit more rain we can keep ahead of it for a little while longer. We moved onto this property the last year of the big drought in 2006. We were desperate and on water restrictions. The ground was like concrete and the cracks in the soil were big enough to break a dog's leg if it slid off into them. Moving into our home was interesting that summer. We had quite a challenge in installing our privacy fence in the back yard. We rented an auger to drill the fence posts and it wouldn't go down more than 3-4 inches into the soil. Even trying to soak the ground didn't help. We ended up hiring someone who dug holes for foundations. He had a tractor with a strong auger attachment. The ground was like concrete and dry as a bone 18 inches into the ground. Since then we've had years with plenty of rain and we added a lot of foundation planting and trees. We're hoping that we can maintain everything through this drought. The soaker hoses will be our key to keeping everything alive and use the least amount of water we can. We haven't installed drip lines yet, but that will be in the mix soon as another project we need to do.