HOW DRY I AM

“Lord-a-mercy,” as the old folks used to say. Oh, my goodness, I am now one of those old folks, myself, aren’t I – at least to anyone under 50… But I digress… The Lord-a-mercy I hear in my head would be Grammy (who would now be 120) commenting on the dry, dry conditions we are experiencing – especially after the wettest winter I have ever known. “‘Zamazing,” our next door neighbor would have added.

I have been keeping things wet in the veggie gardens and the little garden where the birdbath is, and carrying water in bottles to the mountain laurel and rhododendron, but some of the plants are just a bit far away from the reach of the hoses, and so, to be honest, I have neglected them. My bad. And shame on me. So, to make up for it, I have spent the day dragging out the extra hoses and connecting them to get water to the nearly dead plants. In some cases, it took 3 hoses to get to the withering plants – that’s 150 feet of hose. I do have a 250 foot hose, and the year I planted my crape myrtle trees, it took the 250 plus the 80 and 3 of 50 foot hoses to reach close to the last of the baby trees. I have a tenth of a mile of road frontage, and I thought it would be nice to have a row of crape myrtles for folks to enjoy as they whizzed by on their way to work or home. You might know I would pick one of the driest years on record to do that planting. Duh.

Anyway, my raspberry bushes are way in the back, back even behind the barns… 3 hoses to get to them. I have had a gazillion raspberries this year, but they have been so tiny, I think I set a record for tinyness… Soooo, today I dragged out the hoses… poor babies!

This is one of the dogwoods… and this is the same dogwood just a few months ago – just before the daffodils bloomed. See that clump of daffodils in the lower left hand side? Just above the baby rhododendron? This dogwood is just inches away from those daffodils – and they spent weeks standing in water. I just noticed, that same dogwood in in the post below, standing in water or ice, and snow. This is the grass on the way to the dogwood – it is underwater in the picture above– and today... crunch, crunch. Guess I won’t have to mow it any time soon, will I?

Here is the hydrangea out front. I just had it on a post a couple weeks ago – it is still blooming, but look at the leaves! That took only 150 feet of hose.

One of the fern gardens…

Punkie rolling over out on the “lawn” – note the hose - on the way to the hydrangea.

No point in showing you any more pix of the dryness… this is depressing enough. Well, except that they say we will be in the 100s next week. So, I am working on my gratitude for a couple cool days and lots of hose, and the water that is still available – AND that I am able to get out and turn the hoses on and keep things from dying.

I bet there are some of you who would like to send some of your rain here!