Blessed rain
It’s hard to believe that a few days ago Melbourne was shrouded in smoke from the bushfires burning all round the city, and that it seemed as though it would never rain again. For weeks now our parks and gardens have been brown and dessicated. Even the eucalypt trees are showing signs of water stress - dropping leaves and bark - and the European trees are going through an unseasonal autumn, with their leaves turning brown and falling into the gutters. This is the worst drought for fourteen years, and is having more impact than any in white memory, because it has been preceeded by years of below average rainfall.
But over Christmas it rained! It even snowed on the Victorian alps, and here we had hail on Christmas day, mounting up against the barbecue in which I was trying to cook the Christmas turkey. It was the coldest Christmas day on record.
Today I went for my regular walk to the community gardens, and found there were little green shoots amidst the dead grass in the park. As for the vegetables, they looked almost alarmingly verdant and burgeoning. The beans have climbed half way up the trellis in just a couple of days. The potatoes are flowering, the lettuce bursting out of the ground.
Rain makes such a difference - much more than tap water, no matter how you pour it on (which we don’t - we are becoming fanatical water savers). Someone must know the scientific explanation for why even a little rain makes plants look happier than a lot of tap water.
The drought isn’t over. We are still well under our normal rainfall. But what a blessed thing it is to smell fresh wet air, and see damp soil, and feel some sense of normality return to a world that I know, at a deeper level, is in trouble.
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POSTED IN: Environment, Freebies, Vegetables
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