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July 20th, 2007
Rain Delay

Zanthan Gardens Texas Flood
2007-07-20. I knew putting the house in a trench and then piling a foot of caliche behind it was going to cause drainage problems. This area behind the house will someday be my garden work area and tool storage.

The rain’s continued off and on all week and the work as been just as intermittent. Yesterday was a pretty good day and the framing was completed and part of the metal roof panels installed. In contrast, today it began raining at 6:15 am and then at 10:15 it began raining hard!

When the building part of this project is done, I’ll be able to put in the french drains, a retaining wall, a rainwater collection system, and finally some plants. These are all things I wish were done before all this rain but it just didn’t work out that way. I feel miserable seeing all the rain wasted.

I know that this excess rain been bad for some people but I love it. I always wanted to live somewhere where the summer temperatures top out in the 80s instead of the 100s. Tonight we had to turn off the whole-house fan because the inside temperature had dropped to 75 and I was getting goose bumps.

Tired of the rain? Not when I look at photos from last year’s drought.

Zanthan Gardens Texas Flood
2006-08-26. Drought or flood–that’s Texas. I’ll take the flood.

by M Sinclair Stevens

2 Responses to post “Rain Delay”

  1. From Pam/Digging (Austin):
    July 20th, 2007

    I think most gardeners would agree. Too much water is almost always preferable to not enough. What a difference a year makes, huh?

    I need to get the “after” photo of that same shot up…if it stops raining long enough for me to get outside. More hard rain early this morning. I lay awake thinking of all that water I wanted to use to refill the pond just washing down the street drains. — mss

  2. From Angelina (Oregon):
    July 22nd, 2007

    We’ve been getting rain too and while everyone has been complaining I’ve been loving it. The garden has been loving it too.

    Philip has always wanted to have some kind of grey water and rain collection system in place but it seems so daunting to figure it out ourselves and expensive to have someone else d. it. Have you got any good sources of information about saving rain?