Clearing skies?

After a day of sparodic downpours and grey overcast skies, it was lovely to see colours reflected in a clearing sky at sunset. It didn't last for long though with more heavy rain within a few hours.

Not quite dog days!

I took this shot when I was visiting Red Cow Farm, a beautiful 2.5 hectare cool climate garden in Sutton Forest, New South Wales, which is open to the public. It was a warm to hot summer day last week but not the draining heat of the tropics. In the shade the temperature was pleasant enough to work or play.

Trying to be positive about the rain

It's raining again, with heavy downpours over night and more again this morning. I decided to see the upside of the weather conditions and try out some 'weathered' paintings. These experiments have been left outdoors exposed to the elements with storm clouds added this morning.

Summer Evening in Kiama

4 January 2011 at approximately 7pm. Cool and slightly overcast high summer evening with beautiful soft turquoise shimmering colours.

3rd January 2011

This morning I walked down to the vegetable garden with some scraps for the compost, fed the chooks and headed back to the house. In this short time sweat was dripping from my forehead. It's hot, humid and steamy. Dark storm clouds moved through in the afternoon, but were gone as quickly as they had arrived, and brought no relief.

Sunshine!

29th December, 2010. It is so nice to see some blue sky and sunshine today. I don't like to whinge about rain, but there has been what seems like a constant, steady deluge this month. To check I wasn't imagining the volume of precipitation, I've had a look at rainfall records at the Southport weather station. Rainfall total for December 2010 so far is 494mm, with the highest daily fall of 112mm this Monday. The rainfall total for December 2009 was 107.8mm for the month. I have memories of last year being a fairly wet one, clearly the La Nina pattern is stronger this year.

In the garden, green is luminous, growth is rampant and the climbing Rattlesnake Beans I had planned to seed save for sowing next year, have sprouted in their pods.

Christmas Weather

As you can see from yesterdays weather chart we had a beautiful clear summer's day for Christmas. Lunch was in the garden and dinner on the verandah.

We feasted on local seafood, berries, cherries and Australian free range ham and a christmas cake made from Australian dried fruit and I thought how lucky we were to have fantastic local produce to enjoy.

Earlier in the morning we had called my partner's sister who lives in North Western new South Wales on a wheat and sheep property. Their day was spent rushing to try and get the harvest in before the rains came. Lunch was a ham and tomato sandwich. At about 4pm we got a text from Carol saying there had been a cloud burst and the paddocks and roads were flooded. What started as the bumper year to recover from many years of drought was not to be.

Much is made about the inappropriate use of land by farmers but I think we all want to eat local, not imported, food for our Christmas feast and, for that matter, everyday. Some one is eating a sandwich in the field while you sit down to the family lunch Ms Gillard. Look after our farmers.