We got about three inches of rain just before dawn today. Not only was March was one of the area's wettest months ever, but April is turning out wet as well. Though it's not a great time of year for it from the point of view of farmers, who are trying to get out into the fields, the rest of us are happy about it; it's an emphatic end to several years of worrying drought. At times like this a second cistern would come in awfully handy. As it is, our pond is finally coming back after several years of experiencing the prairie half of its "prairie wetland" mode. The noise from the frogs is deafening. Lately you can hardly walk anywhere without scaring up a little cloud of pea-sized froglets, little guys who've only barely lost their tails. The frog population may be keeping down the mosquito population; at least the mosquitos aren't bad yet.
For several years the drought discouraged us from putting much effort into the garden, which, as the NPH puts it, has been "fallow." We've reclaimed a good bit of it from the wilderness now, so we have thriving eggplants, tomatoes, and peppers though we essentially missed the winter crop of greens this year. Soon it will be too hot to plant much of anything new, so we'll concentrate on finishing up the weeding and mulching.
This morning we got a series of klaxon warnings on the cellphone telling us to avoid flood areas. Those warnings always crack me up: in an almost totally flat area, what isn't a flood area? In any case, flood doesn't mean a great deal when the water doesn't have any noticeable flow to it. A three-inch rain can hardly cause serious problems. When we were first moving down here, there was a five-month period one fall in which 55 inches of rain fell. Even that was inconvenient rather than dangerous; the water table was practically at the surface, so no useful digging could get done, and constructive projects were a challenge. At one point the heavily mulched surface of the ground in the brush around our house felt like walking on a waterbed. When heavy machinery punched through the mulch, that was an end to purposeful movement.
When the lightning stops and it gets a little lighter outside, I'm looking forward to walking down and seeing a vastly increased pond.
8 comments:
Good to hear you're getting some rain.
The frogs have been pretty happy here too. We've also got bats who help keep the mosquitoes down. To judge from how much guano they produce, they must be doing a good job.
Think how many bugs it took to produce that much guano. This is why I think bats are very underappreciated.
I appreciate them. I haven't run them out of my eaves in two years.
Plus, it makes excellent fertilizer.
I'm always fascinated by the ebb and flow of critters due to yearly changes in the weather. One year we saw skunks, everywhere. Thankfully, that's over.
Another year it was bats. My parents had a little bat who lived in the space between their window and storm window.
Every day, he would crawl through a very narrow crack and hang upside down in the window.
But we've never had frogs anywhere but Parris Island, SC. They were tiny green tree frogs, and I had to check the mailbox every day as they had a habit of hopping in there and then couldn't get out.
Enjoy the pond :)
My wife, Mike, sweeps it up periodically and puts it in her coffee trees.
Well, not in the trees. In their pots.
As long as she doesn't put bat guano in your coffee, we're good... :p
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