by Finally. We got some decent rain Tuesday evening. We must have gotten a decent shower when we were gone but that was a month ago and the grass was the color of old guacamole. We got nearly an inch and a half Tuesday night, just about a perfect amount. It may have come down a little hard and consequently there was quite a bit of runoff, but I cavil. Our poor mistreated grass is so thin it doesn’t hold the rain so that it soaks in well and when the sun comes out the next day it can’t shade the damp ground. But for now all is good and maybe we won’t have to go another month before we get another shower.
Kari and the girls are heading for Garland next week to rendezvous with Auntie Jill and their cousins. I don’t know if they will stay through Jill and Kaylee’s birthday or not. Then the Wylies will be here the weekend before the 4th. That’s less than three weeks away. Summer is truckin right along.
This morning I strolled around the place with my pole trimmer taking off dead limbs. Good ol’ Chris hauled the trimmings plus all the twig rakings I’d piled up in the south lane so next weekend I can start down the east lane trimming and raking, if I don’t have to mow. and I probably will. I mowed around my yard last Sunday with the hand mower and may decide to do it again tomorrow. It’s been nearly two years since I’ve had to mow that frequently.
Speaking of the runoff from the rain, I need to engineer some way of getting all the water than runs down the north and south lanes, and it can be considerable, to run into the tree line so it benefits the trees as much as possible and so it doesn’t cut gullies in the lanes. I wonder if a series of raised elongated mounds of caliche, of which I have an ample supply readily at hand, would accomplish that? They would have to be extended well into the tree line to keep the water from washing them out and there would have to be a series to keep too much water from building up before it hit the barriers. Maybe I’ll work on that a little in my spare time.
And speaking of trimming trees, there are a number of dead ones, mostly elms but also the spruce east of 2005 and one I never new what was. I took that one down last Saturday. The elms, being large trees, are pretty unsightly. I think the best approach will be to cut what I can safely, then hire someone to do the rest. It will probably require a cherry picker to get up high enough to cut limbs in such a way that they don’t destroy a fence. It’s sad to see the dead trees around town, some of them quite large. It will take decades to replace them. I guess one could say that most of the trees around town wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for people watering them. Stop watering (or run out of water) and we would revert to prairie pretty fast. But even in places where the trees grow naturally get hit by ice and snow storms that bring them down, not to mention hurricanes and fires. I guess most things are more temporary, including ourselves, than we like to think about.