Our rainfall this year certainly seems to be compensating for the last few years it has passed us by, but, after 8 years of consecutive drought, having an excess of water on the farm hardly seems like something to complain about...
However with the downpours hitting as hard and as frequently as it does, it makes room for a whole new set of challenges. For one - the top picture of the frog above, blissfully lounging in a pool - well that is on the farm roads. Some of the pools left by the recent rains are in fact quite large, and more so the ground underneath it is completely saturated, this means that there is no way that the tractor can access the roads (and many other parts of the farm in fact) without sinking down to the sump.
We even tried driving the road with the pickup truck (or Bakkie as we here in South Africa like to call it) and managed to get that stuck good and proper; deducting a good 3 hours out of our day to get it out of the mud.
I guess it is all part and parcel of the joys of farming...
The above image is linked to a short video, featuring our now overflowing dam, should you wish to view that, simply click on the image above
Two years back while the dam was dry, we managed to scrape it out and make it a tad bit deeper, sadly however with the drought still in play at that stage a huge colony of termites burrowed their way into the dam wall, and at first rain the entire dam wall collapsed, that combined with insufficient rainfall, meant that we spent last year bone dry again. This forced us to make the decision to sell the goats, which we ended up doing.
Since we have reinforced the dam wall again, and readied the dam to receive whatever water it naturally could.
This year the dam slowly filled up to maximum capacity for the first time in about 11 years, then it filled some more... So much so, that the water threatened to cut over the newly built dam wall, and this would be detrimental for our existence should we lose the dam again. As such we ended up having to dig the overflow of the dam to a larger mouth.
That however was not the only place that water ended up overflowing;
This little tank on the top picture, is one of the oldest water reservoirs on the farm, and it holds about 10000L of water - for you non metrical people out there, that is approximately 2641 Gallons of water - that might not seem like a lot of space, and it overflowing well into the rainy season is certainly not such a big deal, the thing is though that this tank was pumped empty to the main water reservoir just the day before, meaning that this ten thousand litre tank filled up to the point of overflowing in just two days with the rain coming down in the way it is.
And it is not just our farm - the picture above was taken on a friends farm.
The last time we were on this farm, we were siting on the dry rocks having a beer while looking out over a hopeless stream of sand - the river was dry as a cork, and the rocks were scorching hot under the full weight of the African sun on their barren surface.
And now it has magically transformed back to a three tier waterfall cascading into a massive dam with a passionate force.
I am not a fan of TOTO at all, but today I can honestly say that I am feeling this song...
