The weather we have had for the last few weeks has been awful. So hot. 38+ for a week. Over 40 a few days. I have spent so much time watering trees. Sort of pointless in that a lot of the smaller trees have died, but I think I have kept quite a few still going by watering.

Its also the time of year when blackberries need spraying. I was patting myself on the back at how few big vines there are left in the main olive tree paddock. But as an experiment I dug one out. It actually had a very large root ball. What was growing above ground was only a token of that plant's capacity. Clearly the relentless heat and lack of rain had limited the blackberries along with everything else. So, while it looked, to someone scanning the paddock, that there were not many blackberry plants, I think they are just hibernating. I've spent the last few days doing the grind of driving around and hand-spraying every blackberry plant.

Its easier because they are small, but harder to see them.

Its so hot that some of the spraying might not be effective. The local co-op runs a localized live weather station which is a fantastic service. Courtesy of TAFCO, Eurobin has its own weather station, and its located directly across the river from us, so its reliably local and accurate. (The Bureau of Meteorology website supplies live date for Eurobin, which it draws from Wangaratta, 60 km away!)

The TAFCO site includes a Delta-T value, which is what I use to gauge whether or not to spray. As a result I've been getting started early with a view to get the blackberry spraying done before 11 am. Its taken three days and I didn't always finish by 11, so some of the spraying might not "bite". In another couple of weeks I'll revisit this job and tackle anything that looks like it dodged the first round.

So, no rain. In January we had 1.8ml of rain. Longterm average for January is 60ml. December we almost had average rainfall, but over the last 12 months we've had about 800mls, when the average is 1200mls. The last "proper" rain we had was mid-December, so its now more than 6 weeks of almost no rain on top of a deficient 12 months, and some incredible, record-breaking hit days. With the depleted water-table that hot dry spell over Christmas until now has killed grasses and it now affecting trees. We are seeing bare earth in paddocks, which is the second time this has happened in 10 years. The first time was the previous year. So, you get it...its dry!

But there has been rain through the north-east of Victoria. Its just missed us.

Look at these screengrabs. Each of these relate to rain coming through the region. The BoM forecast said we would have rain, but for us it never arrived. It missed us with relentless precision! Look how close the rain clouds came......!

(Eurobin is where the hour hand would be pointing at 4:30, and sits on the 128 km radius from Yarrawonga where the radar base is located. All these images are taken from the Bureau of Meteorology website. Its from the OLD website. As I previously complained, the new site radar map doesn't show Eurobin...it doesn't zoom in enough. Only the OLD site shows Eurobin.)

This one looks like we should have got some rain, but 2 January we got nothing, which is when this screengrab was captured.

I have previously complained about the accuracy of the BoM weather forecasts. Our local weather is such a micro-climate I guess I can understand how its easy to be so wrong.

Theoretically we are due for rain this weekend, as is most of Australia.