An especially gorgeous display of fall color this year. The fall has been mild and strikingly beautiful. The fires are out and the roads are all open again. The Forest Service did a little controlled burning, which I thought was a bit of a slap in the face to a valley full of people who could barely breathe for 2 months, but they kept it pretty short. After a killing frost in mid September, we were frost free for almost a month! The salmon are huge this year for some reason.
We had torrential rains last week that triggered mud/debris slides in several places. A number of people who were barely missed by the fire were devastated by the floods and slides. Highway 153 is closed due to a couple huge washouts, so our road is the new highway. Lots of commercial and fire traffic in addition to the normal car traffic. Will the locusts be next?
The whole valley is on fire. Some 300 homes have been lost and it's still burning. The smoke is so thick that we frequently can't see the foothills, let alone McClure Mt. We have no fire threatening us, but it looks pretty scary at night to see the flames on 3 sides of us. The heat is so oppressive and the air quality so bad that I am not getting anything taken care of in the yard. They did get the power back on last week, Thank God - they were talking about a month or more outage. Bless their linemen's hearts. It's really sad - the lower valley especially looks like a moonscape.
We're heading over to the coast today for a doctor appointment tomorrow. I've got the bottom watering trays all set up on a timer and 50% shade cloth hung on all the windows. It might take some tweaking to get the water just right - everything is really damp at the moment so I've got it set for 5 minutes every other day. I'm afraid things will water-log. I started out at 10 minutes every day a couple days ago and that's way too much. We will only be gone overnight so I shouldn't do any damage in that amount of time.
We just got home from spending ten days in South Florida with Deb & Gar. What a welcome bit of heat that was! Saw many birds and gators and had a wonderful, adventurous time. Came home to mild weather and about 7" of mushy snow on the ground. I was hoping it would all magically disappear while we were gone, but alas.
The forecast is for rain for a couple days, but today it's just high overcast and pretty bright out. I'm going to go get a couple hours of work done this afternoon on cleaning up the greenhouse to get ready for planting. I'm hoping to tweak the bottom watering system this year and get a real working technique in place so we can leave for a few days without losing everything. I picked some nice bottom trays last fall, but still need more wicking fabric and some shade cloth. It will be fun to experiment. Greg has an idea for some shade cloth "blinds" and I found some fabric for pretty cheap on the internet.
I've really let things go around here in recent years and I'm really looking forward to pulling it back together now that I'm retired. I will take before and after pictures to record my progress.
