Month: June 2018

Well, we did get some rain. Not a lot, but enough to make plants happy. We also got it in mainly small bursts over a few days. So it was able to soak into the ground up here. In total we got maybe an inch. I’m sure some areas got more, but here it was all of maybe an inch of rain.

Now we’re back to hot with a bit of humid thrown in for good measure. Its hot enough that we are getting Severe Weather Alerts. To explain what that means, here’s a small portion of what the alert says:

“HEAT INDEX VALUES OF 105 TO 110 DEGREES MOST AREAS THIS AFTERNOON.”

So we’ve gone from wet and warm, with one nice cool day, to hotter and humid with heat indexes in the triple digits.

Yup, we may only get into the mid 90’s but our heat index is even higher. Even the dogs don’t want to be outside.  Right now at 7pm it is just below 90 and heat index is 97.

Welcome to Austin Texas weather!

I’d call it more like a short shower. We got it yesterday, got maybe 1/2 inch of rain. Not much. But the plants do seem happy to get it.

It appears we’ve had some problems with our watering system. The system itself waters fine. The problem is it has a rain sensor. This sensor tells it if we’ve actually gotten rain. If you got over a particular amount, you set the amount, the watering system will not water. That makes sense. If you just got 2 inches of rain over night, you probably don’t need to water the next morning. But our rain sensor says we’ve been getting rain – for the past month. So it hasn’t really been watering at all. Well, we haven’t gotten rain until yesterday. So some of my plants are a bit crispy. My garden looks more like a weed patch.

Yesterday we tried to fix the sensor. When you get the little sensor part wet its supposed to expand and say “Hi, I got wet, it must have rained. Don’t water today.” I don’t know what’s wrong with it but I ordered a new sensor. Hopefully that will help. That poor sensor has been out there for 6 years so maybe it just needs to be replaced. Let’s hope.

Since I did some work outside, I also did some weeding in the garden. Its pretty dry. One hose had a leak near the connector, but since its the hose that waters a garden bed the bed hasn’t gotten much water. Even the weeds came out easily. So I pulled some weeds and put in some more seed. We’ll see how they fair being planted in this heat. If I don’t try, I won’t know.

I wish those seeds luck.

With luck we will begin a cool down, at least a Texas cool down, starting today. Instead of mid to high 90’s we will drop down to mid 80’s. Today we are only supposed to hit a high of 90. By Tuesday we should be down to 83. Not cool by most peoples standards, but for this area that’s something. Our nights will still stay in the low 70’s.

They are also saying we might get rain this weekend, on Sunday (Father’s Day). That will bring us this hopeful cool down.

Now one thing to remember is how central Texas often gets its rain. We can get just a light sprinkle, may not even register as a quarter inch, or we might get a downpour and get 3″ of rain. You never know.

The other fun part of rain in this area, is we are considered the Austin area. So if north Austin gets rain, that counts as rain for the area. But the distance from say Round Rock (north Austin) to Manchaca (south Austin) is about 30 miles. Because of how Austin area is framed, it covers from Williamson (top north area), thru Travis, down to Hays (bottom southwest) counties. Travis county is where most of Austin resides as far as I can tell. But the Austin area covers those three counties. Sometimes they even include Burnet County when talking about the weather.

So saying we (Austin area) may get rain doesn’t mean which area may get rain. I have a friend who works in downtown Austin. There have been times they have gotten downpours, complete with flooding, but where we are (corner of Hays County), we did not get so much as a sprinkle.

Let’s pray for rain in our area. That would be nice.

It hasn’t been unbearable weather. That is I’m sure yet to come, usually in a couple of months. But its just hot. Mid 90’s for the days and low 70’s for the night. And that’s what we’ve had day after day after day after day. No relief in sight from this weather. We get some clouds so we have some humidity. But no rain. I can’t call it unbearable, but its hard on plants. In this weather anything that doesn’t get enough water will die. And it might be a fast death, or it might be slow.

Welcome to Texas heat.