Heat, drought and storm coming

Many people write about the heat and the lack of rain and how terrible it is, but sometimes also has its benefits. We are lucky to be in a place where we have no restrictions on watering the garden, but the watering takes to much time, so I do keep the watering to a minimum. The soil in our new raised beds is not ideal yet and we have planted many fruit trees we do not want to loose. I hope once the fruit trees have settled in and grown and give shade on the raised beds and the soil improves in time the watering will not be necessary so much. Other than that we also have the hundreds of trees we planted in the fall. These obviously have not settled in enough yet, so we also have to water these once a week. Despite the watering many trees are struggling because of the heat and extreme burning of the sun. Even some older fruit trees let there leaves hang, like this Cherry.

The leaves on the buckeye show some browning, heat damage.

The leaves of the hazelnut also are beginning to turn yellow, but to its feet the blackberry is looking shining and freshly green.

Many Chest nuts we planted last fall have lost there leaves. Some chest nuts looked as if they had already died this spring, but became new growth out of the roots. That still is green and looking good. The big difference on how plants are doing in a relatively small area is amazing.

The grass is brown, partially the lettuce is burned and the red beets are struggling.

On the other side there are also many flowers to be found.

On a small, ratter sandy, patch we sowed some flowers a little late in the season. We rarely watered this patch, but beside weeds some flowers did germinate. What I find interesting is that the sunflowers just stayed very small and have beautiful small flowers at the moment. I wonder if next year the sunflowers from these seeds will also stay small and if those sunflowers will thrive despite drought.

After days of intense heat we finally got a big thunder storm. We had 28 Liter/square meter of water and more to come in the coming days, so that is nice.

What was not so nice is that the lightning struck our Tiny House and turned off our power. We had damage in our fuse box and our washing machine and the air-conditioning in our caravan broke due to that. Loosing the air-conditioning is very unpleasant since the caravan still heats up terrible during the day. But that is just the way life is. As long as no one comes to harm that is fine and we just enjoy the rain and a little relief from the extreme heat.