sad start 2010

The sad thing for 2010 was my father dying on 20 january after a month in north shore hospital. It was made more sad by the fact that some of his care in hospital was shocking and consequently his last weeks on this earth were miserable.
Alyssa started her job in Gisborne and is settling in- normally Gisborne is very dry but Alyssa seems to have had a lot of wet weather and even the tsunami warning that caused her to be evacuated after only one night in her new flat.
I have been doing a lot of riding and even took Abbie to a ribbon day last weekend that was good fun. I have a new horse in the pipeline providing we suit each other. Hve yet to see him as circumstances keep preventing me going for a ride on him but I am sure we will get there.

Dry brown fields everywhere!

No photos sorry but it is so dry here- we have had hardly any rain for weeks. I have had to start feeding hay to the horses already when normally I don't need to give them hay until May. I am very worried that unless we get rain soon we will have no autumn growth. The mornings are cooler now and if we get an early winter we will really be in pooh street.
We have had a great crop of corn and tomatoes, reasonable crop of courgettes, beans and lettuce but I can no longer water the garden in case it doesn't rain as we only have about 3 weeks of water left in the tank. The tank at the barn is empty, the shed tank is feeding the troughs and we have less than a metre in the house tank.
Mark had found a spring on our hill so hopefully by next summer we will have a good gravity fed supply for the gardens. ☻