Behold the Magnificence that is the French Drain

I have mentioned on here a ridiculous amount of times that we have major flooding issues here at our house. It's ruined our garden several times and makes our backyard a wet swampy mess for most of the year. The flooding is due to two issues:

1) We get entirely too much rain here. We've had about 17 inches since June 1st. I could go into a long drawn out explanation that would cause you to stop reading about why our area gets rain, but the nutshell is this is just what happens in the middle of Florida where the clouds from both coasts clash in the hot summer afternoons.

2) Most of Florida has been built on a swamp. You can put grass down and build a house, but it's still a swamp.

But Farmer B came up with a solution to our yard flooding. This solution is the French Drain system that now snakes through most of the left side of our back yard. Farmer B looked at me lovingly the other day and said that the French Drains were the second best thing we've ever done together - second to having children, of course.

We paid for the current French Drains to be installed by a company, but after watching them Farmer B is convinced he can install the final 5 we need to make our backyard a perfect system of interconnected plastic pipes and sloshing underground water. He has purchased the pipe, the grates and the safety googles and he's ready to dig.

In case you aren't aware, this drain system is a set of little plastic boxes with grates on top (about 12 square inches) that are buried in the yard. The boxes are connected to each other with pipes that are dug underground. These pipes connect with a big pipe that runs to the ditch out front. Farmer B always said our biggest problem was that all the water we get has nowhere to go. It just sits in the yard for days and days getting deeper with each afternoon shower in the summer. The French Drains have given our water somewhere to go. Adding to the problem, our roads and ditches used to flood and stay flooded for days on end, but the county recently dug out our ditches so that the road-water has somewhere to go now too.

I wanted to show off the second-best-thing-to-having-children.

Behold the awesomeness that is the French Drain system. I have posted a series of before and after pictures from yesterday's storm. The amount of flooding you see in the before photos would normally stay in our yard for days upon days. The French Drains have taken this time down to about a day on average.

This is our backyard after one afternoon shower yesterday. I think we got 4 inches in this afternoon shower.

Two views of the left side of our back yard yesterday at about 4 pm


The same views yesterday at about 6 pm


Here is one of the plastic drains. You can't even see it because it's so deep under the water. Trust me. It's down there.

Here is that same drain about two hours later. It's still draining water, but it's visible now.

Where does all this water go? Well it comes out in a torrent of water from a big pipe they installed in our front yard that empties into our ditch. Seriously, all that water is coming from our back yard. Crazy, isn't it?

And that same drain just hours later

Now the front yard down by the road, which floods dramatically too. You can't even walk down the road after our daily afternoon showers.

After

Facing the other direction in the front yard.

After


And finally the culvert under our driveway

After

All the water you see in the before photos came from one afternoon storm. The entire area was dry as a bone before the storm. About every day or two or three it rains buckets and it floods just like in these photos. And now, thanks to our new French Drains and our new front-yard ditches, we're drying up almost like a normal people in a normal house that wasn't built on a swamp.

Garden Blogger's Death Day

Anyone that's been around the garden blog circuit for awhile knows about Carol from May Dreams Garden. She's been voted as one of the most influential garden bloggers and she has a popular monthly post called Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. On the 15th of every month gardeners from around the country can post a comment saying what's blooming in their gardens. It's a great way to see what's growing in other gardens around the country and connect with other garden bloggers.

Then there's Carolyn at Sweet Home and Garden Chicago who hosts Garden Blogger's Muse Day on the 1st of every month. It's a nice way to bring in the month with a poem and a photograph of something inspiring. You'd think as the current U.S. LAPCPADPOUB title-holder, I'd be able to wipe the floor clean with deliciously dire cat poems, but as of now I merely enjoy reading what others write.

But where's the day for gardeners who overwater, underwater, maim, prune or otherwise neglect their plants to a state of dismal droopage or untimely death? There isn't one, my friends…until now.

Introducing my own personal meme: Garden Blogger's Death Day. I've had two planting seasons in my vegetable gardening life and I've had widespread death and destruction both times. I know there has to be some other gardeners out there like me with black thumbs who kill more than they cultivate, or even green-thumbed gardeners who have a lapse in judgment and commit accidental planticide.


Did you accidentally leave the sprinklers on for 13 hours and flood the garden? (check). Did you have an infestation of hornworms and now have leafless sticks instead of tomato plants? (check). Did a freak rainstorm flood your garden and wash away your plants? (check). Did you overheat your seedlings and singe them all to a crisp? (check). Are you so bad at remembering to water your plants that you bought some Aqua Globes from that infomercial and then you forgot to fill them with water and killed the plants anyway? (check). Well here is your support group, baby.

I have decided to host Garden Bloggers Death Day today. I'm so incredibly disappointed that I was actually "getting" this whole gardening gig a little bit this time and then most of it washed away and became a yellow, mushy lump of rotten slush after 14 inches of relentless rain. Here are some pictures of what my garden looked like after the rain - it has since sat in this state for over a week and it's more yellowed and rotten now than when these photos were taken a couple of days ago. It has now been pruned and a bunch of the dead plants have become one with the compost heap.






If you too have had an untimely plant death, feel free to post it in my comments section. Maybe I'll feel like less of a big fat gardening loser if I discover I'm not the only one who can't catch a break from Mother Nature or Mutha Shut Yo Mouth, as she's being called around here lately. Hmph. Maybe we can even support each other like a good pair of pantyhose or a well-staked garden trellis.

I'm not enjoying "it" right now

Yeah, you read it right. I'm not enjoying it. And by "it" I mean the garden and the chickens. All of this rain has meant taking care of both has turned into a chore that I dread each day. Funny how I enjoyed both last week and this week I'm ready to kick everything in the back yard to the curb.


The back yard is flooded. I think we've had over 10 inches of rain in one week. Granted some areas just north of here have had 24 inches in one week and there are roads and schools closed. But 10 inches of rain means the entire back yard is flooded with some areas having about 6 inches of standing water, our pool overflowed and our septic is making us nervous with bubbly digestive gurgles in the back yard.


We can't go out back without the dog getting soaked, the boys getting soaked from head to toe, requiring a full change of clothes when we get in, and me getting soaked from overly-enthusiastic splashing boys. The novelty of this for me wore off after the first day. We're on day 5 now. The novelty of this has not worn off for the boys or the dog.

When you wade over to the chickens you discover that this much rain turns their coop into a stinky-soupy-poopy-cesspool. I had to go to the feed store to buy another bale of hay because their tarp-covered bale of hay is now floating in our wheelbarrow. Their coop has hardwire sides to keep them cool in the oppressive Florida heat, but this ingenious solution means the rain gets in too. I spent close to 2 hours yesterday scraping out gobs of floating hay and poo, digging out clumps of wet chicken food from their feeder and scooping out bucketfuls of heavy, wet shavings from their transportation box (more on this later). Keep in mind I'm doing this while it's pouring with rain and I'm standing in about 4 inches of water. I finally left the coop dry and clean and was thoroughly exhausted when I was finished, but glad I wouldn't have to do anything like that again for a long time.

Last night I got smart and threw a huge tarp over the coop, but left one little part open so the chickens didn't get overheated while they slept. I knew they'd enjoy their first night in a dry coop all week. After hours of procrastination, I waded out there late this morning to discover that the little part I'd left open for them to get fresh air was just enough to make the coop look exactly like it did the day before. Exactly like it did the day before. Exactly. I can't begin to tell you the level of dismay I felt when I saw that. It took a lot of willpower not to grab the chickens and chuck them over the fence into our neighbors yard to mingle with their flock.

Then I waded over to the garden to see how it was holding up. The okra seedlings look quite pretty reflecting so perfectly in the puddle of water that has formed around them. The peas look like they're working on their suicide note and will soon be compost-bound. And you already read about my #&%@! cracked tomatoes. I don't even want to get in there and pull any weeds because my boot squelches down several inches when I step onto our nutrient-free soil, so I think it's best I stay out and watch it drown from a distance.


Before you think I'm really ready to throw in the towel, please know that I've read enough Hallmark cards and listened to enough Country music to know that things always get better after the rain, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, that if you can get though this, you can get through anything, that the sun will come out tomorrow... and that no matter what I'll still have the dog and the truck at the end of the day.

Wet Weather Karma

We've had unseasonably dry weather lately, which has led to wildfires, watering restrictions, insanely high pollen counts for allergy sufferers (me) and just all around crunchy grass and plants. Do you know what happens if you complain about this? Karma comes and kicks your butt and you get days and days of heavy rain, which leads to street-level flooding and overflowing drainage ditches.

And…it leads to me and Farmer B spending some quality time together from midnight to 1 a.m. last night (or should I say this morning?) in the back yard. Such a sweet time to spend with your spouse outside in the pitch dark and the unrelenting pouring rain…there's nothing like pulling wellies and a raincoat over your pajamas and wading out into your yard in the middle of the night to make you feel special.

Our first concern was the chickens. Although their coop has a nice shingled roof, the main roosting area for them is walled in by hardware cloth. It had been raining heavy and sideways all night and I just knew the girls were soaked to the bone. I was right. Their coop was soaked. Their food was wet. The hay was floating around and the hens had water pouring off their backs. There is a covered area where the nest boxes are, but they don't like going in there yet. We brought them in to the patio in the chick brooder box to dry out under the heat lamp. They're a little big for the brooder box, but I could tell they were happy to dry out for the first time in days.


Then we noticed that the pool had overflowed. It was seeping over the edges and lapping on the patio. This means that all the gross muddy yard goo can flow straight into the pool. So Farmer B hooked up a hose at about 12:30 a.m. to begin draining the pool water down to a safer level.

And finally Farmer B whipped out one of his favorite hurricane supplies: Downspout extenders. Do you know about these? They saved our house last hurricane season. They open up like a big accordion and link together. You make as long of a snake as you want by attaching them together then attach one end to your downspout from your gutters and then point the other end as far away from the house as possible. This prevents the gush of water from the downspout from making huge puddles next to the foundation of your house, causing house flooding. We know this because we learned about these extenders after our house started flooding in Tropical Storm Faye last year.



So I'm tired today. And I have a lot of clean-up to do. And an ark to build. But at least my allergies are better.

Where is Smokey the Bear when you need him?

On Saturday Farmer B and I noticed that we smelled smoke outside and were immediately irritated. Although we live in a subdivision it is pretty rural and people think nothing of piling up a bunch of yard debris in their backyard and setting it on fire. This polutes every single yard downwind with overpowering smoke and sets Farmer B onto an angry rampage where he wonders what sort of idiot starts a massive yard fire in a residential neighborhood.

But Saturday's smoke was different. It was really, really strong and there was a lot of it. At one point the entire backyard was filled with a whiteish haze and it got too difficult to breathe outside. Then we looked toward the treeline at the end of our street and saw this.


We went on the news and discovered that a 125-acre wildfire was burning in the woods not too far from our neighborhood.

Then on Sunday morning the news reported on a 150-acre wildfire burning. Interesting... it was definitely growing. The wind was blowing in the opposite direction on Sunday so were were able to spend most of the day outside with only a light smoke smell. We spent the day listening to the drone of fire helicopters flying overhead carrying large buckets of water underneath. Then the wind shifted Sunday afternoon and it started raining hot ash and got really smokey again so we had to come inside.


Now I know that the photo isn't very impressive, but you can't pick up ash that falls on the ground. Obviously, it disintegrates. So these are the pieces that floated into my hand when I was outside taking pictures.

The smoke got so thick that the sun was obscured all afternoon and looked really strange through the clouds.


Then late last night we were taking out the garbage and noticed that the sky was glowing orange in the direction of the fire. We watched the 11 o'clock news and the lead story was the 400-acre wildfire and how amazing it was that it grew so fast in 24 hours. They aren't overly concerned because they're saying that it's not a threat to houses.

Let's hope so.

Update: Apparently there are two similar large fires burning in our neck of the woods. One has now forced 200 people from their homes into shelters and the other one (our one) still isn't threatening homes.

New movie - "The Flattening"

If you thought "The Happening" was scary, wait until you see "The Flattening." It's M. Knight Shyamalan's blockbuster thriller currently in production. It's about a novice gardener in Central Florida who actually grew some nice looking zucchini seedlings and plants them in her garden. Then it happens - a freak cold front blasts through with a vengeance bringing with it insane winds that flatten everything in its path, including the precious seedlings. Oh the humanity!

These winds were a sustained 30 mph all day with gusts up to 40 mph. I saw two trees down in our neighborhood.

And the seedlings went flat.


As a pancake.


A couple managed to stay strong.


But the carnage. It's rated R for violence and gore.

After the rain: Final Verdict

I've been carrying on about what TS Fay did to our already failing garden, but now it's time to belly up and show some pictures. It wasn't pretty before, but the saddest part for me is that we had beautiful green bean plants, pumpkins, sunflowers and peanuts starting. They were the only plants that were a nice shade of green and actually looked promising. Now even they don't look so hot.

I think I've figured out why we have so many beautiful dragonflies in the garden. Did you know they eat mosquitoes? Yup. They usually eat other flying insects, particularly midges and mosquitoes. The fact that I can't even go out in the garden to weed without being overrun by blood-sucking biting mosquitoes makes me welcome the dragonflies.Back to the plants. Fay's flooding killed off the rest of the tomatoes that were clinging to life. They are just brown sticks now. I do have one tomato plant in a cage that is still managing to grow, but it's not a pretty shade of green at all.
Oddly there are nice green tufts on the carrots, so I'm still wondering if they'll grow into anything. Is it allowed to annoy me that I accidentally planted the carrots out of season and they are the greenest thing in the garden right now? The peanuts look all right, although they aren't great - the sunflowers have yellowed and are drooping. I hold out hope that a few may pull through.

The pumpkins are the worst part for me. They were so green and leafy and promising. Now they look just plain sad. I'm clinging to hope that at least one will pull through. Here's the before and after pictures of my best pumpkin plant.

Before
AfterI did learn something new about pumpkins thanks to a highly credible source on gardening: the Halloween issue of Highlights magazine. They did an article on a little girl who grew a monster pumpkin that won a biggest pumpkin competition in California at 948 lbs. Apparently this little girl has more mad skills than I do. "Amber" says that the best way to get a pumpkin to grow better and bigger is to bury the vines as they grow. She carried buckets of dirt from other parts of the garden and scooped soil around each leaf joint. If the vine stays buried, a new root grows down from each leaf joint and sucks up extra water and nutrients for the pumpkin. She says that the big leaves are like waterspouts that channel water right to the root. I'd like to bring that little girl down here and watch her try to grow a one-pound pumpkin in our death dirt and then I'd send a hurricane or two her way and see how she rolls. Hmph.

Oh, I also read a very interesting pumpkin fact - a giant pumpkin can gain 25 lbs in one day. Fascinating. Not that I'll ever need this tidbit, but I liked it nonetheless.

So there you have it. The best pumpkin advice I've read so far. Highlights magazine. Go figure.

Waterlogged

I didn't necessarily have visions of a lush garden full of plants heavily laden with vegetables when we started this garden, but I really did not envision the dying swamp we have now. I really thought I'd be able to keep up this blog with tales of the garden, but instead I have tales of flooding. We do still dream of replanting... if we ever dry out...

Farmer B took these pictures tonight on the way home from work. It was getting dark and they were taken with his camera phone, but this is our street. He said the kids were going underwater and resurfacing, like they were in a swimming pool, but it was the road. You can click on them to see them bigger.




It's just crazy. The rivers are overflowing. The lakes are overflowing. Neighborhoods are still being evacuated. The road from our house to Aidan's preschool is closed due to flooding.

And we just leaned about Tropical Storm Gustav - with Florida in his path.

(sigh)

Metamorphosis Lesson

Since the garden needs to drain for awhile - a long while, we needed to find another nature outlet to occupy the boys. Farmer B spent most of the evening yesterday digging a trench from the corner of our front yard between the two septic drainfield humps and out to our front ditch. It's surprising how fast the water is flowing through this small trench and it's really helping to lower the water level around the house. Farmer B has a sore back and blisters on his hands as a reward for doing this…and once again, I got tired just watching him. Our big fantasy is that we can walk through our back yard instead of wading though it. How your priorities can change overnight.

With all of the rain, we've got more frogs than you can imagine. And this newly-dug ditch is now home to an entire army of tadpoles. We thought it would be fun to give the boys some buckets and see if they could catch a few. Afterall, gathering buckets of tadpoles is a rite of passage for kids. You'd be hard pressed to find an adult who didn't spend at least one afternoon in their youth dipping a bucket in some nasty water to fish out a tadpole or two. So it was our turn to take the plunge. There is something about gross brown storm runoff water that doesn't appeal to me, but the boys didn't seem to mind. The boys had a good time getting dirty, as all kids do, and we now have two overflowing buckets filled with murky brown water and tadpoles. Jace always manages to find a spot that's just slightly deeper than the top of his wellies. That's a special knack of his. He was less interested in getting tadpoles than he was dumping out water over and over again.
Aidan was very serious about his catching technique. He preferred the sneak approach and then he'd slam his bucket in the water and scream "Take that, tadpoles!" Somehow he caught a small fish in his bucket too, which we cannot figure out. How we ended up with a fish swimming in our front yard storm water runoff is a mystery. There's not even a lake or river next to the house that would explain the fish. I guess it just really did rain that much.
Hopefully we'll keep some of these little guys for awhile and see if they sprout legs. We'll let them go when they get bigger to live out their froggy lives in the great outdoors. That is, if they ARE frogs. I've been reading up on tadpoles and it turns out that these might be toad tadpoles. If indeed they are toads, we can have some more residents for our Space Toad House. I read that toad tadpoles are usually small and black and frog tadpoles are larger not black. These all appear small and black, but I guess we'll have a better clue when they start to grow.
Since we're always trying to sneak learning in wherever we can, we found some great online resources for learning about tadpoles and the metamorphosis process. We'll be using all these this week with the boys while we talk about our new tadpoles.

Grow-a-Frog Learning Guide - This is a 20-page teacher's manual all about frogs and their life cycle. This is a homeschooling mom's dream lesson plan guide.

Tadpole to Frog cut-out transformation activity - Color in the parts, cut them out and you can act out the metamorphosis with your very own paper frog. Aidan colored in our frog and I cut him out. We didn't have the special clips it suggested for the frog parts, so we're just taping them on as we go. So far our frog only has a tail since we have tadpoles, but we'll soon add rear legs when they become froglets, then front legs, then we'll rip off the tail.

How to raise toads for organic gardening - How to catch a toad and make him happy in your garden.

All About Frogs - Including kids activities and coloring pages.

Frog Life Cycle coloring page - Love this!

Something Froggy- Online frog guide. This is really well done and has two different books depending on the age group of the child.

Damage Done

There was a break in the rain today that allowed me to wander out to the garden and take a look at the damage. It's flooded. The plants have either washed away or are floppy and submerged. I suppose there is a chance that some of them might perk up if the soil drains and the sun comes out. But it's quite obvious that the majority of the garden is a complete failure. If it wasn't bad enough before the storm - it's done for now.

Here's the once-beautiful row of pumpkins.

And the once-vibrant green beans.

Oh and these…these are sunflowers.

The yard is a lake. You have to wear knee-high wellies to wade through the grass. The frogs are so loud at night that you can barely speak over them. At least someone is happy.


On a bright note, there are more butterflies and dragonflies in the yard than I've ever seen before. It's funny, all the birds go away when there's a hurricane and you know it's past when you see them come back. Apparently butterflies and dragonflies follow the same logic.

One of our back rooms has started to flood. We have heavy gym equipment on the carpet so we can't pull back the carpet all the way to see how much of it is wet. It's quite clear that the edges are very wet though. It's heavy gym equipment that requires a professional to assemble/disassemble so we don't know what we'll do at this point. We discovered it last night and spent the night drying out the room with a fan and a humidifier - then today we got torrential rains again and it's even wetter than it was the night before. These pictures are not that exciting, but they're a real cause of stress for us.

Wet carpet - mildew on the baseboards - saturated carpet padding.

And we lifted up the black gym mats and found mildew underneath.


But, this is a gardening blog, so we will wait for the soil to dry out and continue with the mission. We will replant. And I will learn how to grow something if it kills me. I realize this blog has turned into a bit of drama over almost losing our dog and now the events of Tropical Storm Fay, but as soon as we dry out enough to get back to normal, we'll be back to figuring out how this garden growing thing works again! Thanks for sticking with us while we deal with all of this...