Deluge, inundation, monsoonal fury; pick your overly-dramatic descriptive and you’ll probably be giving a perfectly accurate report of the sky’s behaviour towards my back yard. For 2 or 3 days now, we’ve been pelted pretty much non-stop by a heavy rain. In the past 24 hours, our rain gauge has collected about 140mm and it was over 100mm the day before. After emptying the birdbath this morning it took less than 3 hours for the heavens to refill it. It’s seriously wet out there.
Happily, most of the garden is holding up rather well. When the clouds arrived they came with the added punch of wind. (The fact that the wind vanished within the first few hours might explain why the dark sky hasn’t gone anywhere yet.) The result being that on the first day of rain, one-third of the Brussels sprouts were knocked over. Thankfully they do seem to be springing back a little today.
The sunflowers, which are in their final ripening stage, are hanging in there. I’m worried about them getting waterlogged since we’re supposed to have more rain through Monday but, fingers crossed, hopefully my seeds won’t rot.
Earlier in the week Frank started work on creating more veggie beds in the back yard – the fruits of his labour are pictured at the top of this post. Not surprisingly he’s lost a bit of enthusiasm for the task at hand. But once the weather improves, he can get back at the new beds (somewhere between 1 and 4 of them) and I can start thinking about my spring crop. I’ll need some fresh compost (which is currently a muddy heap) for seed beds and to super-charge the new veggie beds. Luckily we started with a bit of time up our sleeves. Spring seeds should be sown in August.
Laura Rittenhouse's Gardening Journal 