What a weekend: torrential rain

We had torrential rains over the weekend: many separate waves of severe thunderstorms delivered 1.75 inches of rain on both Saturday and Sunday. These heavy rains came on top of almost 2 inches of rain earlier in the week.

Flood waters rushing down from the tree farm behind us

We had flooding, as we always do during heavy rain events. Fortunately, although torrents run through the low area of our property right around the house, the house itself sits on a hill, and we don't get flooding into the basement.

Looking down the hill from the house -
the garden hose is a bit redundant, don't you think?

The ground is saturated. Thankfully, the agricultural tile drainage system that my father advised us to put it when we bought this acreage worked its magic as usual. Our property dries out quickly after heavy rain and flooding. We are indebted to his foresight. It was the first thing he said we should do, and we had it installed in the first season - before laying out any lawn and garden areas.

The creek flooding its banks on Sunday afternoon

It has been difficult to get enough time between storms to cut the grass, which is growing gang-busters because of all the moisture and the cool temperatures we have had all month.

(I was going to write: "the cool temperatures we have enjoyed all month," but I know that most people have been complaining about the weather. After all the drought we have endured for almost a decade, I don't dare complain about this weather, even if it is excessive. Besides, John and I prefer cool weather to sweltering heat.)

The creek flooded up to the top of the bridge at the road

The only damage here: a lightning strike that fried our telephone line, and we are still without phone service 24 hours later. (On the bright side: at least the usual plague of telemarketers can't get through.) A couple of weeks ago, the electronic controls of our range hood were ruined in a thunderstorm, and that prompted a costly repair.

The bottom part of our east field on Saturday afternoon:
we had just as much flooding the next day

We were lucky to have so little damage. Sadly, in the city of Hamilton there is major flooding of many homes and cars that were swamped by sudden flood waters. A local expressway had to be closed because of heavy flooding, and we got caught in the resulting traffic jam while on the way to visit friends in Stoney Creek on Sunday evening.*

Flood waters creeping up toward our meadow on Sunday

Today is sunny and lovely, with a good wind to help dry things up, but more showers are in the forecast. Amazingly, this July hasn't been as wet as last July, but there are a few days left for it to catch up. The big problem over the past week and the weekend: there just wasn't enough time to dry out between storms.

*It turned out that Stoney Creek got almost 5 inches of rain on Sunday afternoon alone - on top of heavy rain in the days before, which had already saturated the soil. (That's more rain in one afternoon than the average precipation for the entire month of July.)

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Did we ever get rain today!

I had been hoping for rain to give us some relief from a dry couple of weeks, and our current heat wave. Well, it rained, and how!

Creek banks flooding onto our property

Our little bridge across the creek under water

This was the scene following two and a quarter inches of torrential rain (and a bit of hail) that came down during the lunch hour. As always, the creek flooded and the lowest part of our property near the road is under water. By evening, it should be cleared, unless we get another thunderstorm.

The storm brought so much rain in such a short time that a road near us washed out in an area where they had just added a culvert and some gravel, but hadn't yet replaced the black-top paving. No damage here, but the petunias in my containers have been flattened. A small price to pay for much-needed rain, and they will perk up again.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Signs of Spring Part 2: flooding

Here's what it looked like as the creek at the front corner of our property over-ran its banks today. We always get flooding after heavy spring rains. The reason: the golf course ponds are high to save water for the summer, so there's bottleneck. And before the water even gets to the golf course, there is a too-small culvert at the tree farm road where the creek runs. Fortunately, the worst flooding is on their property, not ours.

Between tree farm and golf course, we're caught in the middle, but we haven't had any really serious problems. The flooding usually resolves in a day or two. But you never know what would happen if we had days and days of rain.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Mud season here. On deck: Spring

Our creek floods its banks again
Winter's retreat is long and ugly: we have officially entered mud season.

This is my least favorite time of the year, but it's the last hurtle to get over so we can at last enjoy some spring weather.

Most of the snow melted as temperatures are finally went up a bit yesterday and today. Overnight we had rain, which together with the melt run-off brought the inevitable day of flooding. Fortunately, it was very windy, which should help things dry up.

What we really need is some sunshine. Maybe tomorrow...

High water under the crumbling bridge at the road
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

It's the cruelest month

T.S. Eliot wrote:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Do you think he might really have meant March, but that April just sounded better?

Today's pictures are of the great meltdown and our creek flooding after the rain. Cruel indeed, but we need to get through mud season to reach spring.

No red-winged blackbirds yet. Last year at this time they'd been here a week. The snow is melting late. But at last it is melting.

Private investigations
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Crazy rain and flooding - but not here

One of my sisters lives in Algonquin, Illinois, near Chicago. In constrast to our never-ending drought, she reports:

Crazy rain – we are now at 27.5 inches since mid July. We drove through several areas of flooding over the road on our way home from work last night. It took 90 minutes as opposed to the usual 25 to get home. The river in our town is flooding as well. Good thing we don't live near it.

Meanwhile, in Mike Johnston's part of Wisconsin it also keeps raining. As he wrote yesterday:

Damned if it's not going to rain again today, if the gray sky is any indication. I don't mean to complain, because I know a lot of people have gotten far worse in recent days, weeks, and months—in other parts of this country as well as in England—but, man, have we ever gotten hammered lately. It's been raining for six days. We haven't had a chance to get the grass cut in between downpours. Every day I think, well, it can't rain again today. I should stop thinking that.

In the six weeks that my sister has seen more than 27 inches of rainfall, we have just barely cobbled together two inches in dribs and drabs over the course of several disappointing little showers. We could actually use six days of rain in a row, we're so parched.

Here's the result: the Agriculture Canada drought map (click on the picture to see it bigger) updated to Aug. 22 shows record dryness spreading through many regions in the southern part of the province. We are in the record dry red area between London and Toronto.

When it rains, it pours

When it's hot and dry, plants suffer. But even gardeners get drought-stressed: I'm a bad case – drought makes me cranky and anxious, even questioning my commitment to gardening.

This happens despite the fact that I grow mostly plants that can tolerate a lot of dryness. I get drought-stressed because I'm a perfectionist. My garden hasn't a hope in heck of looking its best if it never rains – a big concern when there are garden tours coming.

I also hate having to drag hoses around, trying to remember which plants need watering. (Anything recently planted that hasn't had time to develop good roots needs attention.) Not only that, I worry about running cisterns dry and burning out pumps. And if it doesn't rain, I have to buy extra water, as our well water has to be reserved for the house.

This year we had very little rain in May and June, which worried me because that's when most plants make their annual growth spurt. May brought less than 3 inches (2 inches and 8/10ths to be exact) and June was even drier (only an inch and three quarters). Luckily, temperatures stayed on the cool side, a big improvement over June 2005 when we had both drought and an early heat wave that lasted for days. Talk about high anxiety!

Last year, thunderstorms finally came to the rescue in July, and so it was last week too. We finally got rain – in buckets. It came down three times, twice torrentially: The week's total was - insert drumroll - 5 and ¾ inches!

The picture below shows the flooding down at our creek after the last bout of rain brought one-and-a-half inches overnight when the ground was already saturated.


That was in the morning. By afternoon, things were still soggy, but the flood waters had receded.

The rain was exactly we needed and it came in the nick of time to help the garden (and the gardener) weather the current heat wave. Thank you, thunderstorms! Sometimes you just get lucky.