Wanted: Water/Rain/Hope

If you live in Eastern Ontario (along with many other places in North America this summer), you are experiencing a huge rain deficit! Here in the Ottawa Valley, it is affecting many of our local farmers. Produce is not growing as quickly, if at all, and anything that is growing is seeming much smaller size wise, and some just not tasting the same. For example, I find that most of the watermelons we have bought this summer are a very pale pink and not as juicy or tasteful as they should be. Likely a result of not getting enough water.

This spring we decided to put in our first vegetable garden. We planned it all out, decided what we would plant and set off to get started. We live in the country and have the space, so we made a 16′ x 20′ garden. The Victoria long weekend in May, we planted everything with big hopes of what we would harvest from it. Ahhhh! What dreams they were! We have faced many hurdles with our first garden: from deer and other little forest animals eating the plants as they were coming up, to probably needing more fertilized soil. But our biggest problem is lack of water. We try to water our garden daily, sometimes twice. However, we are on a well, and with the lack of rain, we are being cautious of using too much water each day so that we don’t run dry! It is a good thing we were not depending solely on this garden for food, cause it has been slim picking so far!

For the past 5 years or so, I’ve loved planting flowers and learning more about the process. Watching every spring all the perennials come up, then planting some annuals to have ongoing colour. Well this week I am waving the white flag on my flowers. Other than some around the house that can get shade, my flower beds are beyond repair. They are dried up and some of the flowers have shrivelled up to non existence! A lot of my perennials did not do well if they came up at all this year. It is a pretty sad sight, and feel like a bit of a waste of money too, for the annuals I bought that are no longer there.

Don’t even get me started on our grass – or more like our hay field turned desert-like yard! The yellow, crunchy grass just sits upon the hard, sand like ground. When you poor water on it, it just sits on top, too dry to absorb the water at first! I was also noticing today that the trees are loosing their leaves here a lot. The leaves are coming off the trees and are crispy and brown already. Some of the trees are looking all shrivelled and droopy. It makes me wonder what it will be like come fall when we usually look forward to all the pretty colours over Thanksgiving – will there be leaves left, and if there are, I doubt they will last or be colourful for very long.

I’ve tweeted, and commented on facebook about how much we need rain. So this is my blogged plea to Mother Nature to send us some rain! End these drough like conditions!