All I can really talk about this last month is RAIN. Ordinarily I am happy to see the rain. I know that in the winter in my climate, South Carolina Zone 8a, rain falls. The winter rains fill my well and furnish the lakes and rivers with sufficient water to last through July. Normally, my thoughts on rain are neutral, like those of Robert Louis Stevenson:
Rain by Robert Louis Stevenson
The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.
This sort of rain is probably falling gently on an English garden. It doesn’t wash away homes, plans, or gardens. I like this sort of rain. I appreciate its ability to keep me indoors on a day I would rather be outside in the garden but I need to stay indoors. Maybe I get rainy days because, as an unknown author said,
“God made rainy days so gardeners could get the housework done.”
(At least I could try to get it done but with three children and lots of mud created by said rain, it’s unlikely that it would actually ever be DONE.)
This winter, we have had Forrest Gump rain:
“One day it started raining, and it didn’t quit for four months. We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin’ rain, and big ol’ fat rain, rain that flew in sideways, and sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath. ”
Forrest must have been in Blythewood, South Carolina instead of Vietnam.
I do take a certain amount of joy in hearing the rain pound on my metal roof. I do not enjoy seeing what scanty topsoil my garden may possess wash down the hill towards the ocean.
Erosion
We have been working as hard as possible to stop the erosion around our house. As mother did when I walked with her through the woods as a child, I stop my children when we wander among the trees and look for fox dens to lay logs and sticks horizontally across areas that might become gullies if we don’t stop the erosion.
Over Christmas, my children and I went to the enormous gully at the bottom of my parents’ pasture to gather greenery to make wreaths that began to form, I suppose, when my great-grandfather cut all the timber off of the gently sloping hill. He cut the timber as compensation for being able to use the land, and he removed it all, with the help of a few relatives, by using an ax to cut the trees and mules to move the timber. Imagine the determination it took for him to do this sort of work with no chainsaw, backhoe, bulldozer, truck, or any other sort of machinery.
There are no deep gullies on my property, but there are the beginnings of gullies. I live in the relative flat-lands of the middle of South Carolina, and so gravity has been on the side of the people who cleared the trees from this land the first time. As I tell my daughter when she wonders when she will ever need to know formulas about gravity and mass and slope and such, water flowing down a hill moves faster and is more destructive than water flowing along a flat surface, and the steeper the slope of the hill, the faster it moves.
Gardening in spite of the rain
To plant my crops on time, I have been employing several strategies from no-till methods of cultivation. I acquired many of my ideas from the book, “The Market Gardener,” by J.M. Fortier. He has a website that details much of the information in his book.
I gleaned many of my weed-control strategies from him and I also wrote my own eBook, called How to Have a Weed-Free Garden: Using easy organic methods. Fortier, because he lives in Canada, is mostly concerned with being able to plant on time because of snow and frozen ground. He uses tarps both to kill weeds and to keep the soil dry and to accelerate thawing of the soil in the spring.
I use his methods to keep my soil from washing away and to enable me to plant even when the entire world, it seems, is covered with mud. This morning I took the video below to show you my garden even in the midst of this week’s monsoon. The ditches between the raised beds prevent the soil in the planting beds from washing away.
The weather forecast promises me three days of sunshine after today, so I intend to don boots, wade through the mud, and plant my seedlings in the dry soil. You all would like flower bouquets in time for Easter, maybe, or at least Mother’s Day, right? I surely would.
Here is what I was doing in another March when the weather was behaving: planting potatoes! It is time to get them into the ground if you can save them from the rain. Make sure your soil is well-drained because they will rot if left in muddy soil.