There has been no rain here beyond a few drops for a long time, and I don't expect any for several weeks yet. This is our dry season, and it has been like this every year for the past few years especially. The brush fires have started, as they do every year at this time. I am looking forward to the rainy season (which in recent years has unfortunately moved from Summer time to late Fall), and hopefully my plants will survive until then on what little I can help them with. So far, so good. But I have lost a bit of fruit and flowers. At least, the plants, and some of the fruit, are holding on. No actual plant loss yet. But it's rough, because I have a lot of new plants, and new seedlings. The winds at this time of year make it much worse, because as soon as you give water a wind blows through and it's like you never did anything. I look forward to having my rain catchment system completed by the end of this rainy season, so I can fully stretch my resources to easily supplement this time of year. But when the plants are better established, it won't be so bad.
Thankfully, my native plants are all doing quite well through the drought, and many are pushing flowers and fruit right through it as if it is no big deal. They're made to deal with harsh conditions, and I appreciate them all the more for it! Good thing, because parts of the yard are much too far away for me to supply additional water to. I'm getting beautyberries, blood berries, fiddlewood fruit, ground cherries, various coffee cherries, native red mulberry (which tastes almost identical to very ripe strawberry, I'm surprised to find!) etc. etc. etc. in abundance. And the purslanes are flowering stunning scarlet and magenta and purple, and the dollarweed that is new to my yard is happy, and both are great in salads and extremely valuable medically, so that's a good trade-off for the other plants being a little less cheerful. And of course, the drought only forces the bougainvillea (also edible) to bloom more, so that's a pretty way to compensate. In a few more months, they'll probably all have more rain than they can deal with. So I'll savor at least this moment when there are fewer mosquitoes, and no hurricanes to worry about, in the meantime.
