Hello again, Green Friends!  It’s been a while, and I apologize for that.  Lately, it seems there’s been little to write about.

First, we experienced ridiculous, nearly unbearable heat and humidity through the latter part of summer.  I remember wondering how humans manage to live without air conditioning!  And then I remembered:  I DID live without air conditioning, and it wasn’t pleasant.

Then, we had a drought; now we always expect August and September to be pretty dry, but this year was special.  We have a rain gauge, not particularly accurate, but good enough for our purposes and I try to write in my calendar when it rains and how much it rains.  Sooo…from July 1, 2024, to October 24, we received 12.75” of rain.

Now, when you’re facing a hurricane, hurricanes are bad news.  But here in southern Indiana, we will occasionally receive beneficial rain from hurricanes, especially those in the Gulf of Mexico.  Hurricane Beryl sent us 1.5” on July 9; Hurricane Frances provided 0.75” on September 13 and Helene sent a whopping 5.5” from September 27 through 29.  If you discount the contributions of these three storms, we would have gotten only 5.5” from July 1 to October 24.

Irrigation kept my gardens alive, but just barely.  We did lose a few plants, but nothing of real significance.  Wonderful Husband’s lawn, his “pride and joy” was hit really hard.  There are lots of areas which are bare dirt (not soil…DIRT).

I have been thinking about how I should re-do my gardens to (1) reduce maintenance, (2) improve appearance and (3) conserve water.  Mulch is going to be a much more important aspect of my future gardening efforts, reducing the “need to weed”, improving appearances, conserving moisture and (if you use an organic mulch, like wood chips) improving your soil.

Now, none of us are as young as we used to be and I find that kneeling down to weed, plant or spread mulch hurts much more than in the past.  I may have found a solution:  two twelve-year old boys in the neighborhood want to work for me!  They are much closer to the ground than I am, so I’ll carry the mulch to them and let them spread it.  Problem solved (I hope!).  Plus, I’m teaching them about plants and gardening while we work.

Wish me luck and as always,

Stay Green, Good Friends!

PS – With any luck, Mother Nature will try to embarrass me and make it rain buckets!  Let’s hope, anyway!

PS – Check out “Drought.gov”, which has all sorts of data and maps on rainfall, even in Europe.