Are you suffering a green drought?

At the moment most of Australia is suffering a severe drought. Some have called it, a once in a thousand year drought! How they come to that conclusion is beyond me as Australia has only had records, and even then only partially, kept since European Settlement some 200 plus years back.

However it is a severe drought, there is no doubt about that; and much of the country is very, very dry. Yet in other places there is lots of green growth. This greenness is confusing and is what is called “Green drought”.

A classic example of this is what has happened in our own back yard, in that area nominally referred to as lawn but is really just a grassy area when conditions suit. Up to just before Christmas it had been very dry and next to no rain and the grass everywhere including the back yard had browned off and was pitiful looking, almost too non existence around where there were trees. However just before, during, and after Christmas, we had some cooler weather and a few decent showers. No-where long or heavy enough to make any difference to Water Storage levels, but enough to make the brown dry grass, spring back to life and make the yard look green again.

Now this green drought phenomenon can be confusing because when you look at the nice green yard it is hard to believe that there is still a drought on. However the rain that we have had is just enough to kick things off again but not enough to make the grass really grow. So it looks green but there is no quality or quantity in it. It is nice to look at but useless to feed live stock on. Not that we have any grass eating livestock in our back yard.

In many ways this early growth can be unadvantagious too. My dad, who had a small farm, used to hate early summer rains that had no follow up rains to keep the recently germinated grass seeds going. Because if you have too many false starts like this, you end up exhausting all the existing desired grass seeds in your pasture and end up with a paddock full of weeds later.

What about you now? Are you going through a severe once in a thousand year drought?

Or what about a green one? Does everything look green on the outside to others looking on but there is no quality or quantity in what you are doing?

Have you even checked “your lawn” lately? Is it dry, green or even overgrown with weeds?

Do you need to get the Supreme Gardener it to clean it up again?