Rain
We started this spring behind in rainfall. As I recall it was about 5" short of where we should be. May and now into June have changed everything. We had rain not quite every day in May but Houston ended up with nearly 12" for the month. That's not exactly what we got here on the property since we are 70 miles west of downtown Houston but we got a lot of rain.
The temperatures have been lower than normal since we have had so much cloud cover and so much cooling rain, but the grass and the plants and the mold have all done well this last month. We had a little bit of a break in the rain over Memorial Day weekend so we managed to get most of the property mowed. It wasn't a pretty mowing job since the ground and the grass were pretty wet but I am much more comfortable walking around knowing I'm more likely to see the snakes before I step on them than I was before.
We had two big storms blow through here in the last week. The first one came through Friday night of Memorial Day weekend and took down two trees. The easy one was the lone hackberry tree in my small copse of trees in the run around. That's the grass drive that goes around our arena. We will get to that tree at some point. Right now the broken upper half of the tree is resting securely on the bottom trunk and on the ground so it's no danger to any of the animals.
The second tree to take the big hit sits on our neighbors property but it fell across our fence and into the llamas usual pasture. The tree is large - about 25" in diameter where it broke the fence - with a smallish root ball. It's a huge cypress tree that looks like it's been dead for a while. It was covered with grapes that securely attached it to many smaller trees. They all crashed through the fence together and managed to take out about 40' of fence. I'm confident the llamas wouldn't have tried to get across the broken down fence but the goats are a different story. They are much more brazen about investigating new pastures. To keep that from happening, I moved the goats and llamas up to the top pastures, opened and closed different gates and moved the hog panels around to make those areas secure. As long as I don't need to get them all into the barn, we're fine.
Ron has been working on the fallen trees/grapes for the last week and has gotten everything but the tree itself cut apart and moved slightly into the pasture. He has patched the fence back together and added some fence panels for support. I should be moving the goats and llamas back to their normal pastures soon.
The second storm I mentioned came through this Thursday evening. The rain pounded, the lighting flashed and the thunder boomed. And the ditches and some of our front yard filled up with water amazingly fast. Fortunately the rain moved through quickly so the water was back in the ditches after only 20 minutes or so. And no additional trees came down.
Our ground is saturated and yet it just keeps raining. Fortunately, not like Hurricane Harvey where it pretty much pounded rain constantly. We have breaks of sun and brightening skies but we can expect rain daily for the next week. Try and stay dry out there!