Yesterday, I mentioned the trials of the weather we have had this year. From May 8 to June 8th, I had 11.2 inches of rain in my rain gauge. I just checked a weather site, and the normal yearly amount of rain that falls at a local lake is 19.2 inches of rain! Did I mention I have a pumpkin patch? It's not at my house,  it's a few blocks away, it has flooded twice since the day before Memorial Day. It had rained an inch and a half on Sunday night, and I worked in the yard all day on Memorial Day, and didn't leave my place. I kept thinking, I should go check to see if any of the pumpkins are up yet, but would get busy and forget about it. Tuesday morning, heading to work, and I discovered the water running down the street, and the pumpkin patch completely under water! It took 3 days for the water to completely drain away. I was sure the pumpkin seeds were probably either washed away or drowned out, so I was thrilled with a few days after the water receded to discover some of the pumpkins sticking their noses out of the dirt for a breath of fresh air. A few days later on June 3, I  planted a few more varieties of pumpkins (did I mention I love pumpkins? and lots of varieties of them). That was a Thursday. On Friday night, my rain gauge caught 3.5 inches of rain! I wasn't home at the time, but I was told that the rain came down very fast and very quickly. There is a drainage ditch that goes from the north to the south side of my property, on the west side of it. For the last couple of years, it has been completed filled with tumbleweeds. If you don't know what a tumble weed is, consider yourself lucky!! Some friends and I tried to clean it out the winter before last when there was a lot of snow on the ground, by burning the tumble weeds..but a north wind came, and filled the ditch even fuller than it was before! Well after the 3.5 inches of rain..the ditch is mostly clean of tumble weeds, because when I came home, they were all in my yard!

It was heart wrenching to see all my hard work washed away! My yard was looking so pretty this year, the iris had bloomed beautifully for the first time, since I had moved them, one of the peonies had bloomed, and then I came home to this site. I was heart broken! I have awesome friends and family, and between us, we were able to get the yard looking as good as it was before the flood! I am thankful that I wasn't home when the water went rushing thru my yard, because I would have been terrified! I saw stuff that had caught on the top of a sage brush bush that was waist high on me, and that was on a flat  part, not a place where the water was being channeled, so it's scary to think how deep the water in the ditch was. I know one thing, the ditch is about 6 feet deep..and it was mostly washed clean! The main damage to my yard was caused by tree limbs and tumble weeds causing a dam towards the north end of my property, and since the water couldn't go down the ditch like it was supposed to, it came over the side of the ditch and into my yard.

Remember I mentioned  how thankful I was about the raised beds and the landscape fabric in my veggie garden?  The raised beds run east and west, and because of that, the water was channeled right thru the garden, and the veggies were not harmed at all, in fact the veggie garden is doing better than it has in years! I have been picking snow peas, regular peas, onions and lettuce, and since the lettuce was in a boxed in raised bed..it wasn't hurt from the flood waters either!

It took a full day with 4 different people working on my yard, but by Saturday night, it was hard to tell that it had been such a disaster that morning. On Sunday, I burned one of the tumble weed piles, the other one is too close to the trees to burn, and by Sunday afternoon, after I mowed..if a person didn't know that there had been total chaos on Saturday morning, they would never had guessed! I've been trying to post some more pictures..but having no success, so I'm guess my computer is saying it's time to call it a night! I will post more again later