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Blogs by Linda Watson
Bring back the rain! 6/27/2010 8:51:54 PM
Well, a quiet weekend for once at Low Arvie! No dramas, no crises and NO RAIN! We have not seen that particular commodity for almost two months now and things are beginning to get a bit worrying. Galloway is notorious in the UK for its fairly high rainfall. People I meet down in England often ask me 'How do you cope with all that rain?' The reason for this is mainly the weather forecast on national TV which comes from London. There is usually a black cloud with raindrops issuing from it plonked over SW Scotland and my theory is that they do this automatically and don't really either bother to be accurate or care to be. They just think 'Oh Dumfries and Galloway, its sure to be raining there!' Many, many times they are so wrong, but it does put off tourists and visitors from coming here. And that's a two way street too. We could use the income that they would bring, but it keeps our roads from being clogged with traffic.
Anyway back to the weather at the moment. As you will know I was praying for the good weather to last until we got the silage done, and those prayers were answered - its all done and in now and the grass re-fertilised ready to cut again in September. All the fields around the district seem to have been cut and cleared too. So it can rain now. Up here, every conversation begins with discussion about the weather - and I mean every conversation. Its amused me when I first came here. There is no such thing as a short telephone conversation, you have to spend at least the first two minutes praising the good weather or bemoaning the bad before the purpose of the call is even broached and it is discourteous to try and cut this short. Well, now over the past week these 'openers' have changed from praise for the sunshine to desire to see the rain again.
The only trouble is that once it begins to rain, it doesn't seem to know when to stop. What we really need is a climate where it rains in the night and is nice in the day, but no, we either get wall to wall sunshine or wall to wall rain. Just at the moment, though we really do need the rain. All the rivers and burns are very low and farmers will soon have to begin carrying water in bowsers to their animals out in the fields. We are ok as our burn has quite deep pools which will never dry up, but others are not so lucky. July is usually a wet month (both books) and this is the reason we have left the RSS (TLoLA) and now cut the silage in June, so we have hopes that 2010 will be no exception and the rain will come next week.
This farming life is just a roller coaster where we are buffetted about by the elements and spend our time coping with what comes.
