Arkansas Drought Continues…

When I look at the vegetable garden in this photo, it doesn’t seem like we’re in a severe drought. Walk out there and clouds of grasshoppers (who thrive in parched conditions) fly away like those horrid flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz. I try to walk in a direction that sends them into the chicken pasture, to the delight of the hens as they scramble to catch them with moderate success. Mendy prefers to catch them with a minnow net and using them to fish for catfish with great success. In the garden, the wonderful t-tape irrigation system seems to be keeping most things going. We’ve even had a bumper crop of tomatoes this week and already the freezer is filling up with tomato sauce for winter.

But any drive out in the countryside these days—like the one I took in Madison County this week—will show the drought very clearly. The fields that have tall grass are pure gold at a time the fields are usually still green. With the lone oaks in all that golden grass it looks just like parts of California I once visited, not Arkansas in midsummer. Many fields have been grazed down completely (and probably finished off by grasshoppers) and the farmers are having to feed cattle hay already. In midsummer. That’s not good.

This map puts Northwest Arkansas in the best portions of the state, and Fayetteville and eastward seemed to get some rain this week. But Larrapin Garden is on the Oklahoma side of town and not a drop has fallen. I think we’ve had one good rain of about an inch here back in May, and a couple of days with a less-than-half-inch shower that didn’t even wet the dust under the trees. I have a feeling this particular microclimate, a rocky high plateau, is a deeper shade of orange than most of NWA. And if this is merely “severe,” I really hope I don’t have to see “extreme” or  “exceptional.”

Drought is obvious stress to the land, trees and wildlife. Less obvious maybe, but it’s a wearing stress on people who love the land, trees and wildlife. I’ve been feeling a lot of that lately.   I’ve been reading about the projected climate for our region in the upcoming years, and frankly, the news isn’t good: more heat, droughts more frequent, and when it does rain, more heavy rainfall events more associated with flooding rather than those long slow soaking rains that get deep into the ground.  The projections sound a lot like what I’m reading so often in the paper now. This week it was drought in the midsection of the country, flooding in Houston, or was it Florida..no that was last week.

It’s sobering, to say the least. Then I started reading Bill McKibben’s latest book Eaarth—trying to really educate myself on the changes I’m seeing in the land —and well, the first half of the book can certainly make a person wish to be much, much less sober. As in, eat, drink and be merry because… well, you know.  I’m pushing on through, because he says that creating hopelessness and apathy is exactly what he’s trying NOT to do. No Bill, the depressingly well-documented facts you quote will do that on their own! As in current facts, not future projections. Still, I really want to get to the ‘what to do’ portion of the book —which sounds akin to the Transition Town movement — and past the current climate-facts portion. Yikes.

Meanwhile,  I’m spending  time studying on techniques for resiliency for the land and gardens here at Larrapin, mostly found in permaculture books and websites. The small applications of permaculture I’ve tried here at Larrapin have been quite convincing.  On a grander scale, this set of before/after photos of these permaculture techniques in action in climates far more inhospitable than ours is grounds for realistic inspiration in my opinion. I’m particularly amazed at the size of some of these successful projects…the kind of news I only wish I could get via mainstream news instead of still-obscure Australian internet sites.

So it seems the challenge of climate change for me is this:  how to stay grounded in both gratitude and reality.  As usual, I’m finding lessons—both somber and hopeful—on both in the garden.

Thanks for stopping by Larrapin Garden. If you are reading via email, please check out the website for recent posts on garden spiders, how “nurse” gloves are handy in beekeeping, how to cool off with a stock tank, and hints for keeping wildlife and trees alive in dry summer heat.