It was madness around the Bogie estates last night. WS and I were preparing for the deluge of rain to hit; first a band of thunderstorms carrying lots of moisture first thing this morning - later the remnants of Hannah dumping more rain.
I was madly picking any tomato that even showed a bit of a blush. I was planning on making salsa again this weekend, but I took way more tomatoes than I would have done for cooking. I also stripped the peas and green beans - not too much there because we had harvested last Sunday. Peppers were harvested as normal; lots of small peppers left on the bush. I took in a couple of squash/gourds and two pumpkins that were ready to go.
The basked is holding about 15 pounds of tomatoes and the red 5 gallon bucket is about 1/4 full of tomatoes.
We left the corn and unripe pumpkins / squash - figured they would be okay with the heavy rain and any wind we may get. While I was picking tomatoes, I felt somewhat like a farmer from generations past madly trying to get in the harvest before all is lost (but, the forebearers would not have had the warning so they would have probably been harvesting in the heavy rain).
While I was dealing with the vegetable garden, WS was dealing with the new shrubs that have been planted in the last couple of weeks. I managed to get 5 more shrubs planted this week but have not mulched any of my endeavors so far. WS was mulching so heavy rains would not wash away the exposed soil.
This is the storm that was hitting us as I got up this morning to feed the dogs. The yellow/re parts were what was moving thru at the time. We only got about 1/4" of rain out of that portion - just enough to wet everything down and hopefully get it prepared to help soak up the 2-5" expected from Hannah.
The lat hurricane that we got a good drubbing from was Bob, way back in the 90's. The 70 mph wind and massive rain did a bit of damage, but not too bad. I remember WS madly digging trenches to keep the water away from the house and to keep the driveway in some semblance of order. This time, the rain water has more defined places to go. WS may still have to some guiding, but shouldn't be as bad. The new part of the equation is that we have a neighbor across the road. This changes everything as far as wind goes as he has cleared a bunch of land so the wind can really get to howling up the mountain and then gets repelled by the trees in the back yard. when Bob visited, the tops of the trees were literally leaning horizontally, but at ground level the winds were probably less than 30 mph.
This could be a bit of something or a whole lot of nothing - we'll see.
What a scramble you've had. It didn't occur to me that Hanna would affect you that much. Asleep, wasn't I? Give us an update...whenever.
Posted by: Cop Car | September 06, 2008 at 09:48 AM