The Great Rain

 December was a tough month. Pigs. Nene. Cows. Horse. 

Rain!!!  I’m not talking about a gentle rain. Not even an inch, I’m taking about a downpour of several inches. It rained all over the ranch, resulting in sheets of water flowing down the hilly pastures. It came down too quickly to be absorbed by the hardened pasture soil. And some of that runoff carved a runoff channel right through the garden. 

Wayne texted me about the disaster. I arrived to find wheelborrowfuls of our precious garden soil washed away. In places, 6 inches of soil was gone, right down to the hard pan. By the way, this is how I discovered how extensive and how deep the hard pan was in the garden. Areas with no hard pan successfully absorbed the water. Hard pan areas did not, thus washed away. 

The area shown above had been freshly tilled and planted. Deep troughs had been created where the soil washed away, leaving the drip irrigation lines suspended in the air. 

There wasn’t much to do except rake soil into the deep troughs and run the rototiller again to try to flatten things out. For the next two weeks we kept finding peas, beans, and lettuce sprouting all over the place. The rain had washed the seeds out along with the soil. 

In order to help prevent this problem again we are taking two steps. First, I have been using a broad fork to help break up the hard pan. And second, one of the volunteers has been digging a runoff trench at the high side of the garden where the worst of the runoff entered the garden. This trench will hopefully divert future runoff to the side while at the same time acting as a swale to capture the rain to add moisture to the subsoil below the garden surface.