A Break in the Drought

Like most of Ohio we've been experiencing a long drought this summer. Ours started sometime in mid June and continued until this past weekend, where we are getting some of the rain from Hurricane Isaac. We did better than most because it has only been a little over a week since we pulled the sheep off of pasture and put them into sacrificial lots. The tough part about the sacrificial lots is that we have to begin to use our winter hay. But I have plans to buy some round bales this week, which will allow us to save our square bales already stored in the barn.

We made the decision after our quick growth pastures were two to three weeks behind their normal growth. These pastures stay wet all year round and sometimes find I have to cut it to keep it in the vegetative stage more often than not. But walking across most of our other fields was like walking on corn flakes. We’ve never seen conditions like this and hope we never do again.

The drought though had a greater effect on our garden. Our corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, garlic and lettuce all suffered or were killed off. This has led us to re-think water and soil. We know our soil is weak and can stand to have a substantial amount of organic material added, but we really lacked water. Since we draw our household water from a fairly shallow surface collection system made up of rain collected from the roof and the ground, we couldn’t spare the water for the garden much of the summer. So this winter we’ll have to come up with a good plan to get us through another drought. Could we be in for another year of drought; that’s hard to say. Northwest Ohio has been in one for three years so it’s possible. But we’ll be better off if we come up with a plan to be able to water the gardens and not pull from the house.