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heat of July Sunday, July 4 2010
To paraphrase the appropriately-named Glenn Frey, today the heat was most-decidedly on. And, not that I ventured out onto it, it was also on the street (as the heat evidently often was back in the 1980s even before global warming had begun firing on all cyllinders). Weather.com claims Hurley topped out at 96 degrees Fahrenheit today, which might well be a record. We generally only get a day that hot once or twice in a year.
In response to the increasingly-arid conditions around the house and in the garden(s), I've had to ramp up my watering schedule. It isn't just the garden and the tomato patches that need watering; I also need to water all the trees that were planted during the landscaping clusterfuck of early June. And there are also a couple of hydrangeas as well as some small trees we planted in years past that have shown signs of whithering in these conditions.
This evening was one of those I chose for watering the new trees and bushes along the road. I have a technique that I might have already described wherein I carry two full five gallon buckets to the trees and water them while letting two other buckets fill at the end of the hose nearer to the house. The technique for filling two buckets unattended is to put one on a tilted platform above the other such that once it is full, it runs over and begins to fill the one below. Theoretically one could fill n-number of buckets this way if one had access to a staircase having n-number of steps, each having a correctly-sized tread. You might wonder why I don't just run more hose so I don't have to carry buckets (I have enough). The reason is that if I'm watering with a hose, it's difficult for me to know how much water I have delivered to each tree, and it's easy to quit prematurely. With the garden (which I do water directly with a hose) this is less of an issue, since the plants are closely-spaced and there are lots of them. But the trees are spaced out enough that I want to deliver a fixed number of gallons to each and not to the soil between them. Generally this number of gallons comes to somewhere between six and ten, all of which is delivered quickly (the root ball is exposed at the top and absorbs water almost immediately).
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