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06/03/2010: "Monsoon Season"

It's been a wet spring... a very wet spring. The Oregonian newspaper published an article in early June that revealed that we got something like 4.8" of rain in May... almost double what we received in February! This has really slowed down work on my drainage project. You just can't grade trenches when they're full of water. The picture above is from one of the few times I was able to work on it in late May. Sadly, immediately after this day, we resumed Monsoon season: cool, unseasonably wet weather.

Note the height of the grass and weeds in the photo above - another downside of the rain, besides the deterioration of the trench depth as dirt sloughs off the trench sides. Gack. I'm really going to have to do something radical (expensive?) to have any hope of getting through this project, I'm thinking. I could either push the dirt back in the trenches with the tractor and start over, or maybe hire some labor help to get the project back on track before everything bakes into a weedy mess.

The daughters came home from school saying that they had been told that the volcanoes in Iceland were responsible for all this rain. Seemed plausible, but after spending a 20 minutes searching on the internet I could find no credible source for this assertion.

Meanwhile, I've potted my bare-root nut trees and other plants, waiting for the completion of the drainage project. I'm guessing that the weather will flip from rain to baking at some point, foreclosing on the possibility of getting these plants in the ground until the rain starts again in fall.