Hot and dry

We have been short of rain here for a few weeks, and the resulting drought has been compounded with very hot weather (38°C) over the last few days.  Some of the larger trees are struggling, and I have been watering them every few days in the hope of keeping them alive.

There is a well here, but the water seeps in slowly, and I can take about 1.5 cubic metres per day out of it.   That's not very much to spread around, and I use it almost exclusively on the veg patch, watering a couple of raised beds every day, taking three days to do all six.

The grass isn't growing much, in fact it's all brown except for the small areas of green around the trees that I water.

We don't yet have any watering restrictions, but I'm sure we will in time.  We have scattered thundery showers today, with some rain, but nothing like enough to wet the ground properly.

When we first arrived here in 2006, there were never any watering restrictions in Summer, but we have had them every year since about 2015 I think.

Blogger seems to be inventing all sorts of new HTML cock-ups - the picture above was put on the left-hand side of the frame instead of in the middle where it has been since I started blogging all those years ago.  I had to edit the HTML.  *sigh*  Why can't they leave this stuff alone?   And the editor is now worse than before - 2 clicks needed now where one used to work.   And I press the button marked "Publish" and I get a little pop-up box that says, in effect:  "This will cause your post to be published, please confirm".  I mean what the hell did you imagine I thought it would do?   Set fire to my PC or something?