Fire Aftermath – Praying for Rain

If you’d told me that we’d be hoping for rain here in Snowdonia, I’d have questioned your sanity and laughed. Well I’m not laughing now, it’s been weeks since we saw anything significant. A few bits of drizzle and a few false promises on the weather forecast but that’s all.

The Aftermath of the Recent Gorse Fire

Happily for us we are on mains water and there hasn’t been a hosepipe ban imposed by Welsh Water so I’m able to keep all the veggies going. It’s tiresome though and in principle it doesn’t make sense to collect, treat and then spray safe drinking water over the ground.

I’ve got some water butts, long empty now, so the real answer to this situation would be a much larger water store. Practically, that would be a pond. We’ve room and digging it out would be fairly straightforward unless we hit a massive rock. But it would be a significant amount of effort and money.

Actually, putting a pond in could be a good idea for allotment sites in dry areas of the south east. I’m sure a site could club together to pay for it and a solar powered pump would easily provide pressure for the plotholders.

If we had a drought like this every year or even every third year I think I’d go for it but years like this are ‘once in a blue moon’ events here. Sadly wild fires are becoming far more common though. We’ve been fairly lucky in this area but the recent large gorse fire has left a huge area blackened.

Dry Grass – This is a Lawn?

What we jokingly call a lawn looks like a brown carpet. I’ve not watered the grass, except around some of the fruit trees that were getting desperate. I know it will come back when we finally get some decent rain. Tough stuff, grass.

What’s more concerning is the grass drying and not growing in the fields. Summer is the prime time for grass growing and feeding livestock. Economically it’s an important crop and lack of grass is beginning to have consequences for the farmers.

Dry Fields – A problem for Livestock Farmers

Worse still, some of the grass lands are drying to the point of becoming a fire hazard. That’s a scary prospect but I think it will break soon.