Friday, July 11, 2008

At Long Last, Rain!


Finally, after 133 days, I had rain at my house Thursday night! We got .90 inches--a small amount by most standards but that's about one-eighth of our expected yearly rainfall--all in one night. I'm glad it finally happened, but it was an inopportune time.

In the past few days, I've had problems with my automatic irrigation system controller. It has been watering everything at erratic intervals. The trees and plants received more water this week than they would normally get in a month. Since the controller is programmed to run at night I didn't realize the problem until all my plants had been watered several days in a row. That may not seem like a big deal, but those extra irrigations over-saturated the soil and it was actually boggy Thursday afternoon. In addition, I just gave my cactus collection an extra heavy watering Wednesday night, a monthly ritual to help flush out salt accumulation. Then, the rain came.

If we have heavy winds or more rain in the next couple of weeks and any trees are toppled, I'm not going to try to save them this year. Been there, done that twice so far. I just spend thousands of dollars to have them set upright and re-staked, with no guarantee that it will work.

I'm not looking forward to my water bill at the end of the month!

9 comments:

Claude said...

yikes, I hope all your cactus come through it...

Aunt Debbi/kurts mom said...

I over did it with the sprinklers last night. Fortunately, there is no rain in sight for us.

Nancy said...

Aiyana,

I love your bog. San Diego is becoming a desert and we really need to start planting like we live in one. Our water situation is scary.

Have a great weekend and thanks for sharing your site!

Nancy
San Diego, CA

-AG- said...

I lost my biggest oldest tree in last night's storm. We had horizontal rain coming in. I think the combo of that and the heavy winds were just too much. I don't know what to plant to replace it. I'd have another Palo Verde but I've developed a really bad skin allergy to the tree. So I don't know what to do right now. Any suggestions are welcome. Hopefully you'll dry out over there soon. Those timers can be really tricky like that. I've had two that went bad myself.

Julie said...

Never fails! Good luck with this situstion! I can't believe all the rain you go in one day...and after all those days of waiting! Man.

kesslerdee said...

We've had 3 nights of rain here- but they've been rather quiet night time rains rather than the ferocious Monsoon rains I expect this time of year.
My yard is completely soggy! We either get none or it is nonstop!
Thanks for offering to list my blog- I'd be honored!

kate smudges said...

Well, the rain was a good thing, but not the over-watering. I hope you don't lose any trees and that the sprinkler failure doesn't bring any disasters.

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry to hear about the over watering situation.
I hope all your cactus make it.
So Cal is getting your monsoons now.
Take care.

The Diva said...

Oh, you poor thing. That's terrible news about your sprinkler system. I hope all the trees are o.k.~~Dee