It rained a good swathe at last! And the forecast is for milder weather for quite a while.

Big humungous storm most of the night (not a whole lot of sleep, as I got up repeatedly to secure shutters and windows and deal with panicked kitties and watch the amazing lightning display).

It started to ease off yesterday; woke up to a thin overcast that boiled up by eleven am to a little thundershower. Not enough to make difference, but good for cooling everything down. So I finally got a chance to get out and do some more digging. I’m trying to turn my bare patch of baked earth, dotted with fruit trees into a garden. I figured to dig round flower beds around the base of each tree. There are five big ones and a few more little ones, plus a few grape vines that were planted last winter and need some looking after.

But having moved here in April and becoming quite busy immmediately after, I didn’t really get a chance to do a lot of digging before the hot weather descended on us. But I started one of the beds, the biggest one. It circles a small fruit tree – a loquat Annamaria’s mum started from seed ten years ago – to a diameter of about 12 feet, so when I’m finished it will be pretty big. But at this rate it’s going to take a bit of a while. But that’s OK. It feels pretty good just to take huge overhead swings at the earth with a big iron farm implement, you know what I mean?

Lovely and cool this morning. Breezy, with lots of shady clouds.

I think I’ll go plant out my sweet potato slips after coffee.

(And thanks for all the other help. Really, I’m overwhelmed… again.)

~