Toasted

The grass in our yard is grillée, as they say. Grilled. Toasted. It's not unique to this year's heat wave. Most every summer has its dry spell and the grass goes brown. The green parts you see are patches of weeds that tolerate the drought better than the actual grass. Our lawn is really a prairie of wild weeds with some grass mixed in.

The last time I cut the "grass" was three weeks ago, on July 4. You can see it hasn't grown at all. The clary sage is thirsty.

Until it starts to rain again regularly, the ground out back will stay brown. Watering it is out of the question. Even if we weren't under water restrictions, it makes no sense to try to keep the lawn green. Our water is better used in the vegetable garden and for potted plants.

The heat wave is breaking. It's still warm this morning (the house will take a while to cool down), but there is a cool-ish breeze blowing and rain is coming in from the west. We're not expected to break 30ºC (86ºF) today, and it should be even cooler over the weekend. The high on our deck on Thursday was 40.5ºC, just about 105ºF. The humidity was very low, down around 20% or so. It was a dry heat. Thank goodness.