Tag: erosion

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Rain, Rain, Go Away, Little Mary Ann Wants to Play (in the garden)

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.

I can’t let all this good soil wash away

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.

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We Have Been Killing Pine Trees

I will never forget going outside one morning when my youngest daughter was a newborn and I was unable to do much work to find that a pine tree, which looked perfectly healthy the previous night and indeed still possessed green needles, had fallen across our patio. It knocked down part of the fireplace chimney and crushed part of the retaining wall. I sent my older daughter back inside the house to inform her father that he was going to be removing the tree, by himself, from the patio that morning instead of pursuing other activities.

When my oldest daughter was a toddler, we played in the back yard under the shade of the pine trees one morning.   A wind arose, and during the afternoon, the house shook. I went outside to find an enormous pine tree lying across the area in which we had been playing. It was safely on the ground without damaging any structures. As I recall, it, too, appeared green and healthy. We stay away from trees when it is windy.

Although we carefully surveyed the area for dead or dying trees before we put in a new shed, a large pine, in the inexplicable way of pine trees, suddenly died a couple of weeks after we put in the shed. Its rapid death might have had something to do with the loud chomping from the thousands of pine beetles that have infested our woods. Their chomping was loud enough to compete with sound of the crickets’ songs at night, and they were quickly moving from tree to tree in the forest and had killed or were killing several trees.
Repaired patio with more trees waiting to die and fall onto the patio; the chimney blocks the view of the shed.


The tree was too near the shed, the house, and other obstacles for anyone besides a professional to cut the tree.  Because we would have to have someone in to cut the dead tree, we decided to cut some more trees. In the back yard, there were trees near buildings and they stole nutrients and water from my perennial beds.

My vegetable garden lies in an area that was previously forest. My father cut down those trees, many of which were entirely too close to the house anyway, and stopped when he felt he was too close to the power lines to continue cutting the trees. The remaining trees, however, shaded the garden and their roots soaked up nutrients and water that might otherwise go to the vegetable plants. They were just waiting for an opportunity to fall across the garden or the power lines.
 

The vegetable garden before trees were cut.  We cut the line of tall pines at the end of the garden, and I plan to put in a fruit orchard there.


We had the trees cut a couple of weeks ago by professionals that had all the necessary equipment and insurance. Tree cutting is very dangerous; I will not forget the sight of the man who bravely climbed 60 or more feet to the top of a pine tree, cut all the limbs out of the top, and then cut the tree down above him in sections about 10 feet long. When he cut a section, a rope tied to the section he was cutting and to another tree or a backhoe pulled it away from him and he hung onto the new top of the wildly swaying tree. I am thankful that neither people nor buildings were injured during the work.



At the bend of the tree is a man who has cut off the tree piece by piece, and has now cut off the top.  

God finally answered my prayers for rain, but in His time, as usual. As the men were getting ready to leave, I heard the first peals of thunder of the monsoon that gave us some of the season’s rain, about 4 inches, within a few days. I am thankful that the rain waited until the heavy equipment left; while they worked, the soil was dry and dusty.  Digging up soil with hand tools bulldozers have packed down is not fun.  I have fought erosion by moving some of the two enormous piles of mulch into the areas the soil washes, and I will plant cover crops as soon as I can to stop the erosion and to improve the soil. 

I have plans for my new garden space, and even though the size of the task is a bit overwhelming at times, I will eventually get the work done.  I would like to have more fruit trees, blueberry, blackberry, fig, and raspberry bushes, and grape vines. I will replace some of the pine trees and sweet gum trees with dogwoods and other ornamental trees that don’t have the pesky habit of falling over for no apparent reason, or, in the case of sweet gum trees, strewing balls covered with sharp points all over the yard. Next spring, I will enjoy the exuberant growth I expect from my existing plantings now that they no longer have to compete with pine trees for nutrients.

I do hate killing trees. Many of these trees were older than I am, and they are majestic, at least until they die and fall over on their own. I am going to replant the area with trees and shrubs that will provide us with beauty and food. It’s not as if I’m putting in a parking lot. I have enough mulch now to last me for years, and the tree service gave the trees to a pulpwood company that will turn them into paper and other products.  We have two large piles of firewood.  There is little waste.
 
It will take some time to transform the cleared area into the fruit orchard I want, and in the interim, I will continue to give myself the pep talk I gave myself that encouraged me to begin the process: “I’d rather have apple trees than pine trees.”  We still have plenty of trees in the woods, and many of them are beautiful oaks and maples, trees that don’t usually fall over dead one morning with no warning.