Rain! It rained!

I did a little party dance when Melissa messaged me a bunch of rain emojis last night.

⛈️🌧️🌧️💧💧💧☔⛈️🌧️⛈️⛈️⛈️⛈️

^ rain emojis, for anyone on a desktop :)

Well, I didn't get to observe the happenings during the rain like I wanted, but I did get to see what happened afterwards.

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Water on the driveway. I wonder how I could use this. There's a lip that keeps it from going into the ditch. I wonder if I could run a French drain down into the yard to keep it on property.

You can see I don't mow the ditch. That serves two purposes: it catches road trash and slows water. I want to plant in the ditch sometime and put small dams in it to utilize it for something other than robbing water away to the lakes 40 miles away.

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Fungi explosion in the south bed! I added that log specifically because of its decomposed state. It's from the yard, and is very punky with some kind of fungi already on it. I don't know if all these different looking fungi originated from the log, but they're really prolific in the last few days. Anyone here a fungus expert?

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Isopods love to eat fungi. I used to add them to my small vivaria to keep down mold. I'm somewhat surprised there's not hordes of them on this small area.

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There's water in the big tote! I used math to figure out a rough gauge and explained it to the kids. Way over Sophie's head, but Sam has a real mind for such things and is really good at multiplication for a first grader. It won't be long til his division skills surpass those of his father, who never got a grasp on long division. Praise God for calculators.

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After adding a bit from the Rubbermaid tote that we had the chicken roof running into, we collected about twenty gallons last night. Imagine a larger more efficient gutter system pouring in there!

I checked the absorption, and where the ground was bone dry yesterday, there's moisture a few inches down. Alexa said last night that we could get up to half an inch of rain. I doubt there was that much, and there was little to no runoff. The insides of the culverts under the road were mostly dry, with only a small thin stream of water. That's good. My land absorbs water. That doesn't convince me yet that I don't need a swale. The south project is in the highest part of the yard, which is encouraging. I need to get a big tote over there too so I can collect more water and make benefit of the height. Eventually I want a network of the totes, but that's a ways off.

To part, here's a grumpy yellow crab spider that was hanging out on the squash plant. Not as good of a close-up as I've been getting, but it works.

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Yes, I deemed the rain enough to justify not watering today. It was a great blessing that allowed us to spend some good time in the yard this morning observing things closer. We're appreciative and hope for more soon. I hope and pray yhat y'all get the rain you need too. Here's to a green tomorrow. I'm headed to bed.

Stay relevant

Nate

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Great update.
At least enough to keep your mulched areas from drying out.
I am so far behind on property cleanup I fear the explosion of weeds I'll get when it rains but goodness knows we need it!

Yeah, I think weeds are better than dust! Lol

I'm actually thinking of a post about our weeds here because i don't know what most of them are and just leave them be unless they're actually in a bed I'm growing (which is actually very little).

For sure look them up many are edible

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