Rain, Rain, Everywhere But.....

It's pretty sad. We have had only 2 rain events during this spring season, once on April 20th that brought 3/4-inches of rain and another time on June 1st which gave us 1-1/4 inches of rain. There have been some pretty heavy rainstorms in Connecticut, but all of the storms seemed to go north of us or south of us. We could see the soil getting dry and dusty.
My husband said, "We gotta hoe around the vines", so we brought out our hook and crook hoe, our go-to hand weeder and began hoeing around our 8 rows of Chardonnay vines since they looked the most parched and then hoed around our Auxerrois. We filled our IBC tank with water from home and gave each vine a little thirst quencher. We did this on Saturday (June 12th) and then saw that rain was in the forecast for Monday. The probability was 100% so we breathe a sigh of relief.
Hoeing weeds is not always a drudgery (I lie), but if we were not doing manual labor, we probably would not have seen this beautiful butterfly that posed so nicely for a photo. Later, I learned from Pamm Cooper that this butterfly is called the Great Spangled Fritillary.

It's Monday and the promised rain has arrived! We are using this rain day to catch up on things left by the wayside for far too long.