100-year flood

It started raining about 5:00 Monday evening. Raining HARD. It started raining hard just to our north in Wisconsin. Before the night was out, we would have 4.8” of rain. At 6:10, I took this picture of the field with the water coming up to the fifth oak. The fact that the water is unbroken to the edge of the field suggests that the creek was over its banks.

6:10 p.m.: The creek is over its banks

I don’t have pictures of the rest of the flood because it just got too dark. At 7:15 or so, I looked out to check on the chickens. Juanita was pecking around in a puddle under an apple tree. The chorus frogs were already going crazy with mating calls. How does that work? Are they dormant in the mud until the Big Rain comes? It’s absolutely instant. Rain then frogs.

I went back to watching TV. The speed of the approaching flood took me completely by surprise. Hilda came down at 7:30 to report that the orchard was flooded, but the chickens were not all in the coop yet. There wasn’t anything to do at that point as chickens are about as easy to herd as cats. Fifteen minutes later, all the chickens were in the coop. I put on my Wellies, which are 12” above the ground. The water was not to the top yet, probably 10” deep. The chickens were all on the roost, well above the floor of the coop, so as long as the coop didn’t float off the trailer, they would be okay. If the water got high enough to flood the coop, it would be a huge mess, not gonna lie.

I went back in the house, took off my boots and sat down briefly. Then it occurred to me that there was a bucket of food in the brown box next to the coop, and I should check on it. Terry went to his shop to get his boots to help me move the box to higher ground. Swear to God, it could not have been 20 more minutes, and the water was 3” higher, over the top of the Wellies. Note to self: wear sandals. My boots are still drying.

While I waited for Terry, I moved a new bail of wood chips from the top of a plastic patio table out of the flood area. I also dragged the coop ramp out where it would not float into the deer fence and possibly poke a hole in it. The brown box was full of water. The scratch grains, in a plastic bucket, were dry. I put them on the patio. Terry and I floated the box out of the orchard and a good distance beyond the line of the water. Who knew how much farther the water would come? The feed, in a galvanized bucket, was mostly dry, although clumps were forming around the holes where the handles were attached. Terry and I took one handle each and put that on the patio. We tipped the box to drain it. I took the gloves inside to wash and dry them.

The garden was completely submerged. All I could see was the tops of the tomato cages. All of the row cover was underwater. I fully expected that it would all be in crumpled rags when the water went down. Our poor seedlings would be buried in silt. And what could we do? Not one damned thing. So I went to bed and worried. And something that I thought of for the first time was the wooden garden shed which was merely set up on blocks. If that thing floated off those blocks, we would never get it back on. And what if the hens couldn’t come out in the morning? Would the whole garden die? Think positive, I told myself. What fun we will have this summer buying produce at the Farmers’ Market! At least we’ll have potatoes! Yes, it was unconvincing. Completely.

I did not sleep well. I was up every hour, peering out trying to discern in the darkness where the water was. In the wee hours, it seemed like the water was behind the fifth oak again.

When dawn finally came, gray and drizzly, the water had gone down. A light rain in the morning washed some of the mud off the plants. The floor of the coop was dry. Whew. The girls were eager to run out and look for worms.

The red maples were still in water.

Flood in the red maple forest (left) and south field

Miraculously, the row cover was largely intact. Unbelievable!

The row cover was still largely in place!

The seedlings were not covered in silt. The pattypans look a bit bedraggled, but still alive.

Pattypans look bedraggled but alive

The tomatoes had mud on the lower leaves and bits of dead grass here and there. The soil was still saturated. And what can we do about it? Not one damned thing. We wait and we watch. We won’t be able to answer the dead or alive question for a few days yet. Meanwhile we debate whether or not to harvest the not-quite-mature but might-rot-if-left-in-ground garlic.

Muddy tomatoes in saturated soil

The garden shed was, praise be, still on its foundations. The inside was what one would expect for a bunch of plastic stuff floating in muddy water.

A muddy mess  in the garden shed

I saw this unusual deposition of mulch in the grass behind the garden. It must have come from the fifth oak, as that was the only mulched object in the upstream direction, but it didn’t seem like a place where an eddy would have formed.

Odd clump of mulch in the field behind the garden

The mystery was solved when I got to the fifth oak. A clump of mulch, presumably glued together with fungal hyphae, floated up in one piece, moved to the field, and settled.

Missing patch of mulch under the fifth oak

I walked back to the creek. Along the way, I saw that our catalpa trees were blooming.

Blooming catalpa

The catalpa flowers have some fancy nectar guides.

Orange and maroon nectar guides

Terry’s nurseries really took it in the shorts. This fence had floated open.

Deer fence opened by the flood

The deer fences caught a lot of flotsam, weighing them down and bending the trees underneath.

Fence pushed over by accumulated flotsam

Broken fence post at the corner

Some of his pots had floated to the nursery edge and tipped over. It looked to me like most of these plants were dead anyway.

Pots floated away

My woodland garden was not as bad as I feared. The straw floated to the lowest corner, but most of the plants seemed to be in good shape. I’ll have to go back and redistribute it if it ever stops raining.

Straw rearranged on my woodland garden

The plants all around the creek were laid flat. The creek was just barely it its banks.

Matted vegetation by the creek. The flag marks where my ramps were in a cage. The cage was downstream several feet.

More matted vegetation

The deer had been out.

Deer track

The burn pile that Terry had been assembling in the fire ring was long gone. The ring was swept clean with the ashes and gravel deposited just outside the rocks.

Fire ring swept clean in back; ashes and gravel in front

I looked for the wild black currants on my way back to the house. For as many blossoms as I saw, berries were hard to find. Pollen limitation, perhaps? I wonder what normally pollinates these flowers.

Just about the only black currants I could find

The upper garden and raised beds came through fine. One of the beds had an interesting plant growing in it. Hilda thought it was a weed and asked me if we should pull it. I thought it looked like something good. And it was! It has grown into larkspur. How did it get there? No idea. When we first moved here, I planted larkspur behind the tractor shed. But there’s been no sign of that for years. Life is a sacred mystery, John-Boy.

Larkspur growing mysteriously in one of the raised beds

Tuesday night (and every night since), a great blue heron has been stalking frogs in the field. This is the best picture I could get. Just after I snapped the shot, the red-wing black bird seen to the right swooped back to attack the heron’s back, and the heron took off.

Great blue heron hunting frogs while being pestered by a blackbird

Yesterday morning, Terry and I took everything off the floor of the garden shed and put it on saw horses to dry. I hosed off the silt while Terry swept. It seemed ridiculous to put more water on the ground, but it was the best way to clean it up. When it comes to silt, the water giveth; the water taketh away.

We had more rain this morning, but no flooding. We need a few sunny days before we can really assess the damage to the garden. Still could get more rain tomorrow.

And one more random nature observation was this moth I found in the house one morning. It is perfectly camouflaged for a tree. On the bathroom wall, not so much. The thing I found interesting is that it not only has perfect bark-colored wings, but also has a behavior of elevating its abdomen to look exactly like a thorn.

A moth doing a thorn imitation on the bathroom wall