Mad gardening skills

I cannot believe it's late July in the Missouri Ozarks and our little garden bed tucked in at the corner of the house looks like this.
Our summer has been so much cooler and rainier than usual, up until the last two weeks or so. The past several days have been absolute steambaths, with temperatures well into the nineties and high humidity. Today we had a significant rainstorm and the air feels clean and cool again. If this is climate change, bring it on. I'm very glad I got the beds mulched three weeks ago, so they were able to withstand the heat wave and still look wonderful. I usually have a yard full of crispy critters by late July.

Another kind of critter is on my radar, though. There's a little calico cat hanging around the house. I thought perhaps she lived up the street, but she's looking gaunt and acts more like a feral than a stray. She's very hungry and seems to be looking for a quiet, safe place to rest when she's over here. I think she may be related to our big tom, Longshanks. They have similar coat coloration and the same haunting, pale turquoise eye color. We currently have six cats: Longshanks, Lily, and their four offspring, Rooster, Goose, Willow and Rowan. Rowan has a different daddy, a feral fellow we call Scrapiron. We haven't seen Scrap for over four months now. I'm a little worried about him.

And Parker has moved on to other spider adventures. She bailed on me sometime last Thursday, and is probably living in the parking garage at the hospital.

Rain, rain, and more rain, but not today

Finally, a day without rain. We had another downpour yesterday, but thankfully it was brief compared to what we've experienced lately. My newly planted impatiens loved getting a drink, and I loved sleeping with the air conditioning off and the cool night air coming in the open windows. I can't say when we've been able to do without the A/C this much in June. It's kind of pleasant, but we could really do without the heavy thunderstorms. Don't worry, we won't dry out. There's more rain forecast for the next three days. My gardens must think they've died and gone to Seattle; the plants are all very, very happy.

Who'll stop the rain?

By 4PM this afternoon, Springfield had endured unrelenting thunderstorms and a total rain accumulation of four inches. We've had erosion and runoff problems in the backyard since we moved to this house 24 years ago. In an effort to manage this problem, we constucted a 2 foot deep or so by 4 to 5 feet wide rock lined trench to control the runoff and minimize further damage. The resulting spillway, for lack of a better word, was a huge project that stretched over many years, and still is not completed to our satisfaction. The large collection area at the uphill end is deeper than the rest of the channel, and we had hoped it would hold water but the pond liner must have been breached by the rocks. It's also filled in with mud from some heavy rains earlier in the year. However, imperfect as it is in its current state, the spillway has afforded us opportunities to play with the landscape and attract wildlife, like toads and chipmunks, that we did not have in abundance previously. And it does control the runoff. Unless we have a 100-year rain, which we seem to get about, oh, once a year anymore.


This is what it looked and sounded like this morning at 10AM with just shy of two inches having fallen. The fence was just starting to lean.





This is what greeted me when I got home from work about 3PM. The fence had been pushed over quite noticeably by the persistent assault of swirling, pounding water. You can see the tops of the plants in one of my rain gardens just upstream from the fence. I don't think I lost any of them, but I can't see the sedges in the video. They were most likely completely submerged, but I'll find out later today or tomorrow if they're still out there at all.

Right, then, time to get out and grab a shovel.