This is serious, folks!
The May 2, 2023 front page of the Lincoln Journal Star tells us the drought is worsening in Lancaster county (and elsewhere across the state). Here is the link: https://journalstar.com/news/local/lincoln-seeing-worst-drought-conditions-in-a-decade/article_37ad1b80-e834-11ed-a83f-c7d3dd143562.html.
Remember 2012? That was the year people in Lincoln received tickets for watering their yards on the wrong days (the city was on even/odd watering days). Tom Cassidy, still working for the City of Lincoln, appeared on the TV news and in the Lincoln Journal Star urging us to stop watering our yards and the let them go dormant (brown). Pictures showed his own yard was brown. Lots of corn was cut for silage that year, as I witnessed when I traveled north to Wayne, NE, to see relatives during 2012. So much silage that bins couldn’t hold it all as there were huge piles sitting in farmyards covered by tarps with old tires on the top. A dreadful year with little rain.
This article in the Lincoln Journal Star today is talking about how 2023 is shaping up. And it’s not pretty. We need to be smart in using the water we have. In 2012, we drove the car onto our yard to wash it (which we rarely did). We stopped watering our grass, which went dormant and came back in 2013. We watered trees, bushes, and flowers (by hand) deeply, but infrequently. The Platte River went dry in places in 2022 and who knows what is in store for this year. Please, please, please……be water wise!