…and plants everywhere are suffering.

In January, I was going to moan about the change of the monsoon winds that not only stripped moisture from the air and soil, but also blew so strongly that even big, strong trees were showing signs of wind burn. Our curry leaf and belimbing trees lost practically all their leaves. I was too upset to photograph them at their worst, but did snap this:

Leaves from the belimbing tree covering our lawn in late January.

But who was to know that a month later, the lawn would look like this:

This is our lawn today. Really.

Yes, the lawn looks crappy, but I refuse to waste water on it because I know how prolific grass is, and that it will bounce back once the weather changes.

This, by the way, is a record dry spell here, according to the National Environment Agency.

It’s been so dry that our latest marrow aborted, despite my efforts at keeping it watered. Last week I noticed some odd discharge near the bottom of the fruit:

I thought this little cluster of round things at the base of the marrow were insect eggs…

I thought they were insect eggs, because I had discovered one or two on the fruit a few weeks ago – but those were small butterfly eggs. These were bigger. When I used a leaf to push them away, I discovered that they were soft and slightly spongy – and when I removed them, a little hole was revealed in the fruit. The next day, there was more discharge from the fruit – brown and sticky, and dripping down to the ground. I guess something got into the fruit, seeking moisture that is missing everywhere right now. The fruit finally gave up today, dropping to the ground and splitting open. The bottom half of it was hollowed out. So we are saying a final goodbye to the marrow plant and will start a new one.

But speaking of starting new plants, I find that I’m in that phase again when seeds don’t want to germinate for me. I’ve had a 20% germination rate for long beans (which usually have a better response), and 100% success with my recently harvested cucumber seeds:

Four for four – all the cucumber seeds sowed germinated!

Nothing else has grown despite our efforts at keeping the germination soil nice and moist. So I’m blaming the weather, and I think will be curbing my gardening activities until the weather improves. Even my compost piles are not composting because they’re too dry…

Well, I’m hoping that my whining here will bring about a change in the weather, because that’s what happened in the past – every time I complained it was raining too much, the weather changed the day after I posted my complaint; and vice versa with dry weather. You can read about that here and here and here and here. I’m willing to make a public fool of myself again here because it is for a good purpose…

I hope your plants and gardens are doing better than ours.

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