Drought update: watering with the fire-hose

Still horridly dry: the map above tells the story. Yellow means low, orange very low, and brown, extremely low. The full map with legend is at the Agriculture Canada site. I added the dot for Hamilton, Ont., close to where we are in the "extremely dry" territory.

So far this month we've had two rainfalls. Both came with thunderstorms and both were a huge disappointment: the first brought 3/10ths, and the second 4/10ths of an inch. This puts us under an inch of rain for the month. I've never experienced a June as dry as this one.

There is another cold front coming through and there's a 60% probability of precipation, according to the forecast. But the rainfall will be likely be spotty; they say 2-4 mm, which is nothing, when you need at least two inches.

I watered quite a bit during the day today, drawing down the cisterns, so that they can collect rain water if it does indeed come.

Here I am wielding the fire-hose.
This evening we decided to get out the pump and fire-hoses and water a couple of huge beds around the house from our pond. It's a lot of work taking the pump to the pond, priming it, and getting 150 feet of heavy-duty hose set up, so we don't do it until necessary; plus we don't want to draw the pond down too much.

Let me tell you: there's a lot of satisfaction wielding a fire-hose to water the garden: you can just pour it on! On the off-chance that we do get one of those thunderstorms that bring two inchs of rain, the pond will fill back up again. Right now, it's only down a couple of feet, but there's still a long, hot summer ahead. I think we took six inches of water off the pond this evening.