Hot Dry Summer

The North Canterbury Summer is treating us to it’s full glory.  Well, not quite it’s full glory, local wisdom tells me that it often doesn’t rain between November and May and we’re still getting a little rain at least once a week.

Most of our days lately have been in the mid 30s temperature wise and very humid.  My paddocks are turning brown and my animals are spending their days finding a shady spot to lie down in attempts to escape the blistering heat.  It’s funny driving down the road and seeing the large trees in paddocks - their shadows are entirely filled with sheep.  It’s become a joke between Miss Seven and myself, we look for the “sheep shadow”.  I’m finding temperatures inside the house of 30 degrees Celsius at midnight difficult to deal with and making it hard to sleep.

Our main water pipe lies on top of the ground for about 200 metres down the hill.  It’s been on the list to bury it so that it stops freezing in winter, but it’s a problem in summer too.  Passive solar heating means that on days like we’ve been having, I can have a shower without adding any hot water.  It’s not so good when I want a drink of cold water though.

This has created a few extra jobs though.  I have to work to make sure that my garden is adequately watered and I regularly have to check that my animals are getting enough green grass.  The brown stalky stuff is okay (so I’m told) but it’s mostly fibre and not quality feed.  I’ve added extra mulch around my fruit trees in an attempt to retain moisture around their roots.  But I think I’ve lost a few veges - quite a few are bolting straight to seed.

One very real concern is the fire hazard.  Because I don’t have a lot of livestock, there are paddocks that are quite long.  Now they’re also rather brown and dry and a stray spark could cause them to take off in what would be a horrendous fire for us.  One of Hubby’s workmates had hay contractors in recently.  They’d almost finished when a blade hit a rock, which caused a spark and all the hay they’d cut was burnt.  They lost the lot.

A neighbour told us that there’s going to be drought.  I’m not sure if this has come from local wisdom and experience or if there has been predictions by meteorologists.  Either way, it means we have to keep a good eye on a lot of things.  The cattle get moved regularly so that they don’t eat the grass down too far - enough to take the tops off and allow the clover to grow up.  We may go back to the gorse project I started a while ago.

I took this photo after bringing the thermometer out of the sun.

Last week, we were predicted to reach 40 deg Celsius.  It was 10am and my thermometer on the deck (in the shade) was already showing 35.  I found it noticeably cooler on the deck than I had been 20 mins earlier out in the paddocks.  Out of curiousity, I put my outdoor thermometer in full sun. Just to see what they get to.  At 10am, it got to 43 C, at 1pm however, it maxed out the thermometer and was over 50 C.

It was a day for hiding somewhere in the shade.  After I’d made sure the pigs had a good wallow sorted and the water troughs were all working.