The last few days we’ve been experiencing some of the wet, clear, cool stuff that falls down from the sky, i.e.: rain. We may have had more rain over the last few weeks than we had all Monsoon season. Please understand, I am not complaining. We will take the rain whenever we can get it. It saves on us watering, helps us to recharge the aquifer, and allows us to see how our rain catchments are working. It also helps to keep things a bit more green – even during the winter – and therefore, less of a fire hazard; however, it does make for more mowing/weed whacking work. Continue reading
wet stuff
24 Wednesday Oct 2018
Posted in Permaculture/Technically, Weather
It has been a wicked long week and we are so glad it’s finally Friday! It seems like Monday was about a month ago. Rather than pick one thing to write on, like I did earlier this week, I thought I’d do one of those general run down things that we sometimes do to catch you up on what’s been happening around the farm. Shall we get started then? 
The rain has come. It began as a mist coming over the mountains, then seemed to pick up in intensity during the morning hours; it has remained with us through out the day. There are long strings of minutes when it holds back, only to pour again as if making up for this lost time. I believe it has settled in and decided to stay the weekend. Monsoon season is over, now we must be into the fall rains. We always welcome the rain, but were hoping that it would have held off until tomorrow, or even just until later this evening, so that we could have had Tom come to help us right the RCW today. As it was, the day was too wet. 
So, it was a rather quiet weekend and on into today. Not a whole lot to report. Sue ended up spraining her foot – not the ankle, but the top of her foot – and it was a fine weekend to prop it up and ice it. I did go to a rehearsal Saturday, so when I got back from that we took eggs to Tom to baker in Old Bisbee. Got back home just in time to do chores. One of our neighbors wanted to purchase eggs, so we made a deal to meet her at the gate around 5. Oops! We totally forgot. Silly people that we are. They were honking, but we were watching The Fellowship of the Ring, which completely drowned out her desperate attempts to contact us. She even called and texted me, but my phone was on “do not disturb” so that didn’t work either. Have no fear, though; we worked it out that we’d leave some eggs in a cooler by the front gate for her to pick up sometime Sunday morning as we are generally gone to church starting at 8:00 a.m. Wrote a thank you note, and gave her an extra 1/2 dozen for all the trouble. I think she’s still happy and, if that’s the worst thing to happen on a weekend, that’s a good weekend. 
…and purposes, it’s been a couple of quiet days. We’ve had a few days of rain, off and on, and we love it. Even though we have been saying, “please let it rain,” we don’t ever plan for the rainy days. Well, how can we? There’s never a guarantee that it’s going to rain. So we just plan the plan and go with it if we can. “The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 
We kinda had forced down time today… it wasn’t the plan, but I didn’t have a very good night and was not feeling well at all, Sue was feeling the affects of the orchard work yesterday as well, so we decided to have a down day. I went off to work and Sue was going to go take care of errands she’s been meaning to do. turned out it was a good thing too, but I’ll get to that. 
I’m craving hot dogs. I’m not sure why that is. Just had hot dogs over the 4th of July holiday, so what’s the big deal? Who knows. Maybe it’s just the summer weather that has me in the mood for a cookout or something. Last week we were in some of the cooler temps of monsoon season, this week – as we have mostly sunny skies again – it’s been heating up. Because it’s monsoon time, the humidity has been pretty high, though lower today than normal, it is still well over 35% and at 95°, that makes for some mighty sweaty weather about now. Maybe it’s the salt in the hot dogs that I want. Along with the temps, the other things heatin’ up are the projects we’ve got going. Thought I’d give a quick run down. 
Yesterday I made my way across the desert. Slowly because it’s always a difficult trip for me physically, and a little worse this time because of some other health issues I’ve had going on the past couple of weeks. But, by going slowly and taking many long breaks that allowed me to walk around a lot, I made it to my parent’s before the sun set. It was a 10 hour drive this time. I think I’ve taken longer. I let Sue know when I arrived, she gave me the weather report for Hereford. They had been having thunderstorms for quite a while. The dogs absolutely hate the thunder; I’m not sure that the cats enjoy it either. It hadn’t really rained, and that was good – because of the chickens – and bad – because we need the water. She sent me a photo, though, that shows it was raining not too far from us. 