Photos were requested from some of my Nevada friends -- greenery and flooding. I can't blame them. I can't get used to the vibrant greens here, having eyes that grew up with browns. They flow through the whole spectrum from kelly green all the way to forest green.I've probably said this before, but storms in the Midwest are nothing like storms in the West. Back in Vegas, the clouds would spend all day atop the mountains until they got enough ummph to move over them. The lightning storms were beautiful, but the clouds were high. Here, the thunder deafens, the lightning might be 20 feet away, literally (I have driven through a storm where the lightning was striking in fields on either side of me). It is overwhelmingly beautiful and sometimes fearsome. These clouds are probably only fifteen minutes away.
The green isn't fair -- because soccer fields are supposed to be green. The difference is, there are no sprinkler systems.
Here's my garden so far this year. Lots of stuff are not planted yet. The big pile of stuff is mint. The tall stuff is tarragon. Those both came back on their own. There are lots of seeds planted, but not much coming up yet. Its a thick clay that I've been working on...but have a long way to go.
I posted on Facebook today that after yesterday's and today's storms, my garden is like Venice. It was a lot worse when I posted this. The water was 3x as high and through all the paths. It's slowly soaking in. But none of the seedlings were hurt. Raised beds did their job!! We just got done digging these ditches. We'd expanded almost double this year. As a matter of fact, we had to run in with the shovels when the downpour started. Maggie had fun playing in the water.
5 comments:
Oh, that makes me homesick. You're right...nothing like the midwest for storms.
Your raised beds interest me. Every raised bed I've seen before has had wood sides anywhere from 6" to 2' high -- like Jane's. But you've got something that looks different. Did you pile the dirt to make the raised spots, and leave the low places for rain? That just seems ingenious to me right now. Did you try it last year? How did it work? I'm guessing it holds all the rain and moisture for the plants, but without drowning anything.
See, I wanted raised beds, but that's not working out yet. But it looks like your plan might be a way to have a middle ground.
Susan,
Yeah, it completely surprised me when I started reading gardening books at the library a couple of years ago that you don't need a border either (but they are pretty). We eventually want to box them up but thought food was more important.
We started doing it last year, and it did work well. We do get a little erosion at the side..but less than I thought, and the strawberries and cilantro have strayed out into the path, but I just move them back.
All we did was dig the paths, and used that dirt to raise the beds. I did it once, too by digging trenches in a different garden, but planting on the mound rather than the trenches, so I had little mini raised beds. All our farmers, I'm sure, thought I was nuts, but it worked well and had the same effect. It's just easier to weed with wider beds.
From someone who has spent her entire life living in Ohio, your perspective is interesting@
This sounds great. Thank you so much for posting about this!
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