Thursday, June 14, 2007

But It's A Dry Heat


Whew. It's hot. Back in the 90s again today, and no rain in sight. We haven't had any rain at all for nearly two weeks, and we were in sore need of it then. I don't want to baby the plants in our gardens too much by overwatering, but right now, it's hard to even do that. Along with the high temperatures, there's been a hot wind blowing through. Even with faithful watering, things look wilted and stressed by day's end.

Many of the plants that I started by seed and planted out about a month ago haven't shown much change in that time. They're just surviving, not thriving.

The only good thing about having no rain is that I haven't had to mow the grass since Romie did it right before his surgery. He's not allowed to do mowing for a couple of weeks yet, so that job falls to me right now.

We keep a solar cover on the pool when we aren't in it, but most summers, that comes off sometime in July or August because nights are consistently warm enough that the water doesn't cool down significantly. We really need to take it off now because the water today was 91° and if we keep the solar cover on, that water could turn green in an instant, even with the proper chemical balance. We're just pulling it back at night though, because with the high temperatures and winds during the day, the evaporation rate is high.

Right now, the only rain in our future is predicted for next Tuesday. We can only hope.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

We had a half hour of rain on Tuesday afternoon that evaporated instantly. I'm very happy I took the time and energy to put down a thick layer of straw mulch in the veggie garden, it's making a huge difference, and the plants are growing even without rain. I just water them at the base every few days. It's a big garden, so I do it on a rotation, and that takes a good hour each night. Glad I don't live in the Southwest!

Muum said...

Dry heat is waaay better than humidity. But 90 is too much for anyone. I am good in the 80's here in low humidity Utah (typical humidity is less than 10%) but it is getting up to 90 + today, here , too.

kate said...

And here we are seeming to get rain almost every day - way more than our usual. Most years, we complain about not having enough rain and this year, it doesn't seem to stop. I wish I could send some your way.

Dry heat is better than humidity, but for us gardeners, please add a few good rainfalls too!!

Jared said...

I know I'm like 10 days late to respond to this blog entry but just wanted to add that we've been up over the 110 degree mark for a couple of days now. And I couldn't even begin to recall when the last time was that there was any precipitation. But we're a different climate and we've got different plants so here's hoping the rain starts pouring down for you in Ohio. And if there's any rain left over once you're done with it feel free to send it out west, I won't turn it down.

Jared

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