A sort-of related story follows...
My garden (the whole place really) is clay soil. It doesn't drain well, but during extended periods of rain you can still drive across most of it as long as you don't break thru the surface tension or disturb the soil. The big exception is my garden because of course it is tilled. You can't walk on it after it rains a couple inches without sinking down past your ankles, some places 1/2 way to your knees.
2015 was a wet year, and my garden was a quagmire and most of the plants had all already turned yellow from too much water but wife wanted a "few fresh squash if any are left" so I waded out into it and pulled a few and held them in my shirt tail, when I sunk down nearly to my boot tops. I'm one of those people with no hips and no butt (I'm like a bug, just got a hole in it's back) and can easily walk right out of my jeans if my belt isn't cinched up tight. Anyway, there I am stuck, one hand holding my shirt tail full of $2 worth of squash, stuck tight in the mud, trying to pull one of my feet lose at a time when my pants dropped down off my hips, so I dropped my shirt and it's squash in the mud and grabbed at my pants about the time one of my feet came out of my boot. So now, I'm balanced on one foot to keep my sock foot out of the mud when I lose my balance and plop right down nearly naked butt first right down in the mess, basically in my underwear and one foot askew still in my boot.
I just reached down, chunked the squash out on solid ground, finally worked my other foot out of the mud, pulled my other boot out f the mess and chunked it in the general direction of the squash, and crawled out of the slimy mess on all fours and pulled my pants back up over my muddy backside and timidly walked back inside the house with wife's precious squash..
That was the last year I bothered with a garden.
your post! Good stuff..
Hubby has a bad habit of watering the fence line if you know what I mean. I always tell him if I catch him at it anyway, "one of these days that fence is going to pay you back!" One day it did. I heard him scream like a girl with his pants displaced and butt on the ground when the 8000 volt hot wire got em! He didn't say much that night. And I have not seen him watering the fence line since!It is days like that ya are thankful to be in the country with very few close by.....the clay here will certainly do the same thing....we haven't been that wet in a couple of yrs, tho. My Mom got into some fireants one time in the garden and quickly came out of her pants and ran to the house in her skivies...
That was a kodak moment!
FLASHBACK TO 2009
Funny you should say that. We have been looking at ducks at a local farmers market the last couple weekends. Thought about breeding them. First to find a desirable breed that others would buy if we did. What is a breed of duck folks would want? So if we did breed, we would not get suck with too many running around during our dry season. Just wondering.
Today's rain total as per gauge by our front gate..
View attachment 37247
Mother Nature is a ________.
View attachment 37248
One of the greenest portions of my goat paddock.
-mother nature
