Many of you know I mostly grew up in Kerrville, but I moved to Bay City in 1997 and my cumulative total here eclipses my Kerrville years.
Like everyone else I’ve been thinking and worrying about the weather.
But hey, it’s Texas and just about everybody is uneasy about our overheated and parched state.
Kerrville gets about 16 inches of rain per year and Bay City gets somewhere in the low 40s.
Needless to say those stats don’t mean much this year.
Kerrville’s worst case rain scenario is the Guadalupe River flow to get so low you can walk across the river bed and not get wet.
There’s not an equivalent comparison in this county since the rivers run a lot deeper here than Hill Country waterways.
But the thing people in Kerrville and Bay City both are looking at are the plants we’re losing.
I worry about oaks just as I did in my Kerrville years.
In Kerrville, the oak wilt destroyed thousands of acres of oaks in the 1980s and whenever I see oaks that are losing their crowns – and I do see some areas around here that are concerning.
Grasses like San Augustine fare better here than in the Hill Country, but lawns here and there are dying.
Our dilemma is the county’s row crops.
You don’t have to be a farmer to see how the heat has played havoc on the fields.
When I was in Kerrville in the 1980s and we were adjusting to the impact of the loss of oaks, I had a couple of tallow trees in my yard.
I know they’re considered trash trees locally, but I didn’t know that then and took extra care to keep those trees watered.
I have several tallows on our place here and old habits certainly don’t die when it comes to trees.
I have two tallows in my backyard that normally produce lots of shade.
Not this year, the leaves are falling off and crunch under my feet.
And the pecans – they’re dropping their marble-sized nuts among the dead leaves those trees have shed.
Same thing in Kerrville.
I’ve found lots of comparisons between Kerrville and Bay City and most of them leave me sad.
