Paucity of Precipitation

For those who follow Die Weide I owe an apology for not writing in a while. We have been out to Die Weide every weekend, but the hours I've been working the past month have resulted in a dearth of energy for writing the blog.

And we move the the critical dearth on Die Weide - a paucity of precipitation. I saw a weather report last week where the meteorologist stated that of the six or seven rain events since January, none has produced more than two-tenths of an inch of rain. Indeed, only one produced more than one-tenth of an inch of rain. So there, upon Die Weide stands a shed with a water harvesting tank that has only collected enough rain to water the orchard trees once. So our last four or five weekend visits have consisted of filling water barrels and coolers at home and watering the orchard and garden by hand. Thus, my writing of Die Weide wouldn't have consisted of much beyond, "this week, we watered the garden and orchard." 

Two weeks ago we had a change of pace in that we invited Mom, Janice, and Kenny out for a BarBQ. Below are a couple of pictures of that family outing. It is great to see that Mom has recovered enough to be able to travel out to Die Weide and enjoy an outing.

Last week Inge and I watered the garden and orchard and hacked a path through brambles next to the creek. The pond still has water, but the level is dropping very rapidly. If we don't get rain soon, we will again have a muddy hole in the creek - the state it was in during the drought last summer. Here a couple pictures of a very primitive garden. Also, even in a drought, we manage to find a few wild bluebonnets on Die Weide.

Orchard Maintenance with Dog Following

Die Weide Bluebonnets

This week Inge and I watered the garden and orchard and for a change just went exploring. I set out with camera and notebook to try to identify a few trees on Die Weide. I will write later of my findings. Here again are garden pictures Inge took today. Note the corn is growing nicely.

In this photo, there are six tomatoes, four store bought tomato plants and two that spontaneously grew from compost leavings in our back yard garden. We have so many of these wild tomatoes that I chose two to move out here. Note how vigorous the wild tomatoes up front appear compared to the greenhouse tomatoes in back! If it looks a little rough it's because we used leaf litter as mulch.