This was supposed to be a post on how good the garden is looking at the beginning of June. On Thursday I was in the garden cleaning the beds and when I finished I looked up the hill and thought that the garden never looked this good in June and that it would be a shame if the storm hit us. It’s just like I’ve invited the storm to come, and on Thursday evening we got another violent one.
I should mention in the beginning that we actually avoided the worse two times. The first big storm came in the later afternoon and avoided us passing a few km north. The storm brought huge amounts of hail, and the villages on the path got completely hail-covered. In some villages, hail accumulation was around 25cm(9.8in).
 |
| News portal photo |
The second storm was coming directly at us, but at the last moment got caught in the Slovenian hills and passed us a few km south. This one also brought hail, but smaller amounts. Still, one bit of this storm managed to hit us.
So what did we get? Of course, again we got gale-force winds. This is something that is starting to be normal weather every week. Also, we got violent rain. The rain was falling at such a speed that we got 35mm(1.1in) of rain in just 10 minutes. The garden was once again transformed into a river, with rain pouring down the paths. The wind made the situation even worse and made the rain fall almost horizontally. In seconds everything was completely wet. The storm lasted around 20 minutes in total, and as fast as it came it also just stopped at once. The morning revealed the real force of the wind.
The agrotextile on the peppers is gone. The wind broke it completely. There’s not even anything left to tie it together. Also, the paths were visibly wet and washed off, I wasn’t sure how much soil was washed down, but I could see from the distance that the soil was shining, which happens when the soil is washed away.
In the afternoon I managed to get to the garden. I could only walk on the sunny side, the shaded side was still so wet that you couldn’t even take a step without sliding on the path. Still, I could get close enough to see the damage.
Besides the broken agrotextile, which is not such damage considering this is a reused piece, the only real damage was water damage.
As I always say, the water will always find a way down the hill no matter how much you try to stop it. The best way is to help the water move from the garden as fast as you can. This is exactly what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years. I make my paths down the garden in a way that helps the water drain faster from the beds. Sure, this can be a problem when you have normal rain, as it will not help the needed water stay. But, since we have sudden violent rain almost every month, this way helps a lot with keeping the plants alive. I always try to connect my paths so that the water can find the quickest way to drain. I make one big horizontal and a bunch of vertical paths through the garden. I try to make the same layout on the upper and the downward part, and this works perfectly, only this year I made a mistake. I messed up the layout of 5 beds. One was done accidentally without even realizing, and 4 were done out of pure stupidity.
I made the cucumber bed a bit wider than the pepper bed which is above the cucumber bed. I don’t really know how this happened, maybe the path went a bit to the left while I was making it, but the result was visible with the first big rain. I have a water path directly in the middle of the bed. It ripped out one of the cucumbers and continued down the bed until reaching the horizontal path. It took a bunch of soil with it, and the soil ended up in the blackberry net. I should mention that the distance between the cucumber bed and the blackberries is around 10m(32ft), that’s how strong the water was. Next year, I will need to be more careful while making the paths.
The second mistake was made out of simple stupidity. I don’t know what I was thinking when I was making the cabbage/lettuce/chard beds. First I divided the quarter of the garden into one big bed, then I divided that bed in half. I planted the chards in a narrow bed and left the bigger part for cabbages. Instead of making the same thing with the second half, I’ve divided the second half into two almost identical parts and planted cabbages on one bed, and lettuce and zucchinis on the other. Of course, as soon as it started raining the path that ended around the middle of the second cabbage bed carried water directly across the cabbage bed. The water pushed out a couple of cabbages and destroyed a good part of the bed.
Still, all of these issues were nothing compared to the damages we could have if we were on the path of the first storm. The garden still looks good, some parts better than the others. Zucchinis and tomatoes are growing like mad and the rest of the plants will recover soon.
Next week I will need to redig all of the beds, especially since we have more rain coming our way. Hopefully, the next rain period won’t be as violent as this one.
Leave a Reply