It’s a nice, very nice rainy Saturday.
After the months of dry, hot, dry weather; after the water table dropping and ground cracking, after the flies and ticks and the grass in the pastures all but drying up…
It’s a very, very nice rainy Saturday.
It’s 9am at the Palmwoods ranch.. the air is clean, the birds are hapi, the kids here are just waking up. Loud hapi little-girl voices, over loud and over exuberant, punctuated by the slamming of doors, as they rush out of their bedroom.
There is a nice, relaxed, hapi feeling in the air.
Big Dawg, Kuma, is still lazing by my bedroom door. Some days he’s up early demanding attention, demanding a feed, demanding to be let out for a leak. This morn he lays quietly, his eyes tracking me as I move about, but holding still as if he does not want to be noticed. As if he simply wants to lie quiet for a while longer.
Over night Morosa Valley got over 100mm/ 4inches of rain. In the last week or so we’ve probably received over 150mm/ 6inches. Which is huge. But 100mm over night is magical…
I was out at the farm yesterday. Our mini-lake was pretty dry. Though the previous rains had helped and made the exposed bottom of the “water-hole” muddy, I could still see the exposed bottom. This morning, after the big rain over night, we can see a huge difference… 
It’s quite amazing how much this has gained over night. I can see that the water table has been restored, rejuvenated, returned to a state of normality. You can see the poly-water pipe and the float that keeps the suction off the bottom. We use this body of water to irrigate. We have not irrigated for weeks and weeks. This coming back is huge to the farm.
The “silver-lining” in the drought is that we got to dig this all out. After years of use the bottom was silted up. A tree had grown in the centre of it. The dry spell allowed us to get a big excavator in and open everything up, enlarge it all and prepare for the next long-dry.
I am very pleased how this all turned out.
Ahhh… the simple pleasures of being a farmer… water security is a good feeling.
Speaking of The Big Dry: Of course, the world knows of Australia’s recent fires and trauma. This has been a bad DRY Spell. A very bad one. And maybe some good will come from it all…
The policies of recent years has seen a loony-liberal-left-leaning attitude of laissez faire are responsible for a lot of the carnage… as I discuss above, the land must be tended. It’s called “husbandry”…
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the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals.
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“all aspects of animal husbandry”
The idea that just leaving the land alone is not husbandry.
And the beat goes on…
Big smiles…
More later
The Native Iowan 
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