Janine and I set up the plastic pipe hoops and installed the netting over the peach tress in the stone fruit orchard 3 weeks ago as the fruit started to appear. These early peach trees develop their fruit so quickly. They swell from buds in no time flat.

We knew that it was time to cover them when we saw parrots in the trees starting to eat the tiny young green fruit. It’s been so dry here as the drought drags on. Actually I don’t believe that it is a drought – an unusual event, that is just bad luck, as the politicians would have us believe. No! I believe that this is the new normal for us in this continuously developing global heating crisis. The rain fall pattern has been changing and our share of the rain has been steadily decreasing ever since we settled here 43 years ago.

We used to be able to get by here in this place with the water that we collected in our dams. We used to get terrific, short, intense rain storms, that would drop 20 to 25 mm. of water in an hour or two. This sudden flow of water had no time to soak into the soil and just flooded down the road in the gutters and then down the ditches that we had dug to harvest that flow, and into our dams. A good storm like that gave us sufficient water to get us through the best part of summer. We don’t get those storms any more, not for a decade or more now. In the 70’s we could get two or three of those storms in the summer months. Sadly no longer.

I have been a long-term subscriber to ‘NewScientist’ magazine, published out of the UK, but we now have our own branch here in Australia these days, with an Australian edition, so the Australian content has been increasing steadily. Over the 45 years that I have been a subscriber and reading the research published on our increasing emissions of carbon into the atmosphere. I’ve seen the steady increase in certainty in the science behind our understanding of the evolving crisis. I’ve also seen the strenuous denials from the carbon intensive industries lobby, building from straight out denial that the earth is warming at all, to now admitting that there is warming, but it is nothing to do with carbon in the atmosphere. All the denial and fake news claims, even the spurious pseudo scientific fake ‘research’ sponsored by the carbon lobby, is straight out of the cigarette industry playbook.

We are drying out here, slowly but surely. We have some peaches on the early peach trees, but there are no apples and just a few pears, as there wasn’t enough cold nights over winter to build up sufficient ‘winter chill hours’ that the fruit trees require to be able to ‘set’ fruit. We did get a ‘set’ of cherries on the trees, but with the exceptionally dry conditions, it has driven the kangaroos up out of the dense bush in the gullies up into our back yard and right up to the house in search of food. They have begun eating the cherry trees lower branches and the parrots have taken all the fruit while it was still green and hard. I’ve never seen that before. These wild animals are obviously very hungry.

In some ways it’s OK, as now we don’t have to worry about keeping the water up to the orchard, as we are very low in water storage. All 4 dams are close to empty. I need to get the portable petrol pump out and pump all the 3 other dams dry and locate all the remaining water into just one dam to minimise surface area and evaporation. We may need that water to fight fires over the coming summer.

At the moment we are OK, we are managing to water the vegetables and the few peaches from our rain water storage tanks, but this is a finite resource. We are already half way through our main large water tank, and we are still in spring! We still have one more large water tank full. That is our reserve supply. We’ll just have to wait and see how things pan out.

With almost every roof on our property already fitted up with guttering and a rain water tank, it’s hard to imagine how we can increase our storage in the short term. We can only double up on our storage tanks to catch the overflow from the original tanks, should there be a big storm – which there will be one day, bit that isn’t going to be any help just now.

For the time being, we have some early peaches to console us and reward us for our efforts.