What's the Dill?

September is drawing to an end.  This morning at church in Sunday School we finished up our 13 week study of Jeremiah and Lamentations.  It was a heart-breaking study.  Jeremiah was called the "weeping prophet" because he told the people of Judah a sad story of judgment that was coming.  They had walked away from the one true Living God and were serving false gods.  The prophet pleaded with them, but they would not listen.  

God chastens those who He loves.  There was famine and pestilence across the land.  Jerusalem fell and the people were taken away in exile.  As bad as things had gotten, the study ended with hope, however, that God is a God who is faithful even when His people are not.  His mercies are new every morning.  We fall and miss the mark, but He calls us back.

We know nothing of the suffering like the people of Judah faced, but I'll tell ya, this summer has been trying, for sure.  Paul Harvey, in 1978 said, "Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to 6 inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains."  Except this summer it hasn't rained.  Today it was 106 degrees.  We will get through this, but the plants, animals and humans plead for rain.  We look back longingly to the spring.  Daily we ate crisp cucumber salad with blueberries and fresh dill.  So refreshing and healthy!  The dill has long since died, dried and gone to seed.

I gently pulled the seed heads off of the remnants of the dill flowers.  Some seeds had already shattered and will likely volunteer next spring in the herb garden.  

In the event they don't, I wanted to ensure that I had a good amount of dill seed to grow for next spring.

If the Good Lord wills, cooler days will once again come.  I'll save these seeds for the time when it is right for planting early next spring.  In the meantime, we'll continue to pray for rain.  It's time to be planting the fall garden, but it would be futile to plant anything right now.

Hot & Dry

Summer is always hot, but this summer we're hot AND dry.  Below I've taken a photo of the log that I track daily rainfall.  Tomorrow it will have been a month since it rained.  Everyday high temperatures have exceeded 100 and with no rainfall, well, it's getting serious.  We normally average almost 9 inches of rain in August.  We are at a serious deficit.

The grass is dying and the dirt is now dust.  Apparently there is a high pressure system sitting over the south that won't let up.  Normal afternoon thunderstorms are non-existent.  We have been praying for rain for weeks.  The forecast has not looked promising.

The cows and goats have eaten all of the remaining grass down to the ground.  We're supplementing with hay.  That hay is normally reserved for the fall, however.  Never had we begun haying the cows this early.  Now that I've gotten the chainsaw blade sharpened, I've been lopping off live oak branches that need pruning and tossing them over the fence for the animals to eat on.

Not only is the drought concerning for the pasture that the cows, goats, and chickens depend upon, but it is delaying getting the fall garden in.  We normally have fall Irish Potatoes planted by now as well as getting the cole crops planted by seed.  I haven't even begun any of that.  Afternoons are spent watering sweet potatoes, peppers, okra, butterbeans, etc. that are struggling in the garden.  Five of our Seven pumpkin plants waved a white flag and withered into the dust.

We'll continue to pray for showers of blessing that will bring a refreshing to the land.

And We Prayed for Rain

And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead, said unto Ahab, As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.    1 Kings 17:1

And it came to pass after many days, that the word of the Lord came to Elijah in the third year, saying, Go, shew thyself unto Ahab; and I will send rain upon the earth.    1 Kings 18:1

Three years without rain!!  That is one heckuva drought!  Our lack of rainfall hasn't gone on for three years, but it has been very dry.  We have been praying for rain every single day.  I even saw this guy out by the garden praying (for rain, I assume?), too.

Rain is so important and unfortunately, we often take it for granted.  Our garden needs it... badly.  Watering with a water hose isn't as good as good old rainfall.  Then there's our pasture.  The grass out in the pasture is parched.  With no rainfall, there's no new growth.  The cows and goats and chickens have eaten it down to the ground.  This is not good.  When they eat it that close to the ground, they pick up parasites.  The only bright spot is that I haven't had to mow the yard a single time during the month of June.  Grass in certain spots in the yard is dying.  Landscaping and small shrubs that we can't get water to are starting to die.

For the past 10 years, I've tracked rainfall at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  Check it out:

So from January - June 2021 it rained 40.4 inches.

Average rainfall from January - June 2013-2021 is 36.63 inches.

Look at what it's rained so far this year:

For the period January - June 2022, it has only rained 17.675 inches.  The weatherman says that around here if you aren't getting an inch of rain a week, you are falling behind.  We certainly are!

If you look at the first two days in July in the above tracking chart, you'll see that it rained both days!  The cows are out eating fresh green grass that has grown.  I even mowed today.  I checked the weather forecast and it shows decent chances of more rain for the next four days.  Maybe the weather pattern has loosened up!  We certainly pray that the drought is over.

Harvested a Few Peanuts This Weekend

A couple months ago I shared the photo below of the peanut plants flowering.  It is a bright yellow pretty flower a little smaller than a sweet pea flower, but very similar in appearance.

Back in August, the row of peanuts looked like this in the photo below.  They are being encroached upon by the black-eyed peas, but peanuts are hardy plants.  I knew they would hold their own.

Fast-forward to October...

Part of the plan this weekend was to harvest some items to make room to put in more of the fall/winter crops.  I got busy with another item that took most of the morning, so I didn't get to harvest any sweet potatoes.  I did, however, harvest some peanuts that I had growing on a row to the south of the black-eyed peas.

It wasn't a huge harvest, but I didn't have a huge amount planted.  I had saved some peanuts from a harvest a couple of years ago.  I wasn't sure if they would germinate or not, but put some in the ground and lo and behold, they grew.  We pulled them from the ground and tossed them over the trellis that will hold the sugar snap peas.  Those, by the way, have sprouted and will climbing on the trellis in about two weeks.  In the meantime, the peanuts will dry out on the empty trellis.

Peanuts, once they bloom, send down pegs into the ground.  On each of these pegs is an embryo and a peanut will form and grow until maturity, each pod holding 3 or 4 or 5 peanuts.

We will allow them to dry on the trellis, then we'll roast them in the oven and eat them.  I'm thinking that perhaps we'll make some homemade peanut butter like we did many years ago.  That was really good.  We experimented and made chocolate peanut butter and cinnamon peanut butter.

Although the crop wasn't exceedingly large, we didn't plant many, and we'll enjoy the ones we harvested nonetheless.  We'll be planting something else in the ground that the peanuts occupied - probably mustard greens, lettuce, or radishes.

From A to Zinnia

Normally we only grow stuff that you can eat in or around our garden.  This year I learned that it can be nice to grow some flowers to beautify the garden.  I selected zinnias because with my first attempt at growing flowers, I figured I would try something easy.  Zinnias are about the easiest.  The flowers are multicolored and they bloom all season long.  They seem to be drought-proof and can also make it during times of monsoon rains.

Back in early spring, I planted them in the holes of some cinder blocks that I use to line a drainage ditch just north of the garden.  The cinder blocks stop erosion.  The holes in the blocks always bothered me, though.  I kept thinking someone would step in them and break their ankle, so I filled them with potting soil and planted an assortment of zinnia seeds in them.  I used some open-pollinated, heirloom seeds so I could save the seeds, if I wanted to and plant more next year.

Nine months after planting them, the zinnias are still blooming.  For the past couple of months, as the flowers fade, I've been snipping off the heads and allowing them to completely dry.

Here is a closeup of the dried zinnia flower head with the petals pulled off.

If you pull on the dried flower, you pull out zinnia seeds!

Here's what's left when you've pulled off all the seeds.  This can be discarded.

We were able to harvest a BUNCH of zinnia seeds!  A couple of handfuls, for sure.

I put all the zinnia seeds in a container for storage.

In about 2 1/2 months, I'll pull the seeds out, work up some more ground in front of the garden, and re-plant.  I'll never plant flowers in the garden and take up ground that could be used for planting vegetables for flowers, but I'll admit, the multi-colored zinnias we planted in front of the garden was a good thing.

October Is Always Dry

Based on data we track, October is always one of the driest, if not the driest month of the year.  So far in October 2016 it rained only two days, netting a whopping 0.5 inches of rain.  The grass in the yard is dying.  There's no rain in the long range forecast that I see.  So I turned on the water sprinklers in the garden to try to give the seedlings some moisture to help them grow.  The dry ground sucked up the water with quickness.

I also asked Tricia to turn on the water sprinklers in the landscaping.  The camelias are loaded up with buds and I'd hate to have them drop them when they'll be blooming shortly.  Same thing with the azaleas and Lily of the Niles.

As I walked around to the back of the house, one thing caught my eye - we have dead leaves on our tangerine trees - in several places, too!  That has me concerned as this hasn't happened before.  I normally don't even bother watering the fruit trees as it hardly ever gets this dry.

But we've got a lot of fruit on the trees that is ripening.  We love all of our citrus trees, and I certainly don't want to lose them.

As I look on the ground under some of the trees, I can see several tangerines that the trees are dropping.  It is way too early for this to be occurring.  I can only surmise that it is so dry, that the trees are jettisoning some of the fruit so as not to be stressed carrying them and nourishing them.

I picked up the fallen fruit and made fresh squeezed tangerine juice using them as I'm not one to waste the fruit.  I chilled it and it was so good.  Tricia sent some juice to Russ at college.  That dude loves fresh squeezed tangerine juice.  It's so tangy and tasty.

So I ran a water hose out to our mini-orchard and turned on the water very slowly. I went around doing my normal chores as the water soaked into the ground beneath the trees.  I can remember one time on a trip to California, we toured an area that had almond and apricot trees growing.  Water is scarce in California.  The fruit and nut growers essentially built small levees around their orchard and flooded the entire orchard, allowing the water to soak in to the roots very slowly.  I attempted to do the same.

Thirsty Citrus

Pools of water beneath the trees gradually disappeared as the dry land drank it up. The roots beneath the surface of the ground absorbed the water and by the next day the leaves had better color and had perked up.

Hopefully this will help take the stress off of the fruit trees and they will hold on to the fruit.  Seems like only yesterday I was whining about how wet August was and now I'm lamenting about how dry October is.