We got soaked yesterday and most of the garden is now underwater. yikes.
from some news article… “In Illinois, a range of windy storms dumped as much as 3 inches of rain within 50 minutes. National Weather Service meteorologist Ed Shimon called the accumulation “unbelievable,” comparing it to heavy rainfall in the tropics.”
today – dry
tomorrow – more rain
let’s hope this dries up soon.
update: went out and snapped some photos with my “good” camera. click thumbs below to see ’em.
Yo! La Casa hosted a BEER DIG yesterday, which means we bribed our friends with alcohol to help get our pit ponded! Something like 40 people showed up, some of them with shovels, for a muddy-fine time digging, grunting, drinking, heaving, hoeing, and drinking.
Some La Casans went out round about 10AM to imagine a desirable curvy shape for our pit-pond to take, wiggling our garden hose and some electrical cords around until everyone ok-ed it. Maria threw down some white spray paint to make it official. “Dig here.” We made a design with two shallow, wiggly fingers and a mound in between.
In the picture above, Liya (purple shirt and fabulous overalls) stands in front of the mound and between the two fingers. You can see how high the water table had gotten from the night before! We bailed out the pit more than once, and it quickly filled back in with fresh water from the ground.
Above: Towards the end of the dig, you can see even the new fingers filled with a bit of water. The north finger is the close one, and on the other side of that soggy mound, you can see a bit of the south finger. We made a lot of progress, and we have more digging to do yet!
Anna, Brett, & Bonnie in a dramatic pic!
Above: Meanwhile, some of us worked on digging new garden beds and raising them up with soil from the pit-pond. We carried sod to the front yard to replant it in a strange patchwork under a tree, hence Vinnie with a wheelbarrow of sod.
Post-dig din: whole wheat macaroni with tomato sauce, quinoa, (leftover) delicious chili, and home-made bread-machineless bread. The sun going down, and the crowd dwindling a bit. The alcohol finally catching up with me….
And finally, as we digested our elbows and beer, we enjoyed a big-ol’ bonfire, the first of the season.
Thanks for digging with us, those of you who did! I, for one, thought it went swimmingly, pit-ponds, garden beds, soddy jigsaw puzzles, bowls of quinoa, and raging fires considered.
Here’s a 3D model in that I’m in the process of building to document our permaculture garden. It includes a mock-up design for the pond that attempts to maximize the amount of perimeter. I’m still learning how to use Google Sketchup so I haven’t added too many bells and whistles.
I sense an interesting utility in 3D modeling software when building permaculture designs. I’m already comfortable using photoshop but it was a conceptual leap to start working in the third dimension. Google made Sketchup very user friendly and they have online tutorials to explain each tool. Here’s a good place to start if your interested. The killer feature that google implemented is the ability to download and add models to the 3D Model Warehouse. That is where all the trees in my model came from. Other users have already started adding their own permaculture designs.
La Casa’s full of people who care about things like, you know, the planet, resources, not wasting those resources, etc. So it’s been a frustrating several months during which we watched our water bill steadily climb (usage, not just cost) heard water running in the pipes and watched the water meter dial clicking along despite the fact that no one was using any water. We walked through with plumbers who looked at this and that and then just shrugged their shoulders. But the sound got worse, the usage kept climbing and the basement flooded more than seemed necessary for the Spring thaw. Finally, a plumber met here with a rep from the water company who pinpointed a pipe (that I had myself pinpointed 2 months ago, showing it to the plumber[arg!]) from which the sound seemed to emanate. This pipe shot off through the foundation to god knows where. Somewhere out into the ground around the house where it seeped back in only to be pumped back out by our sadly busy sump pumps. A terrible cycle.
But, at least it was finally figured out and the plumber cut the pipe at the faulty cut-off valve and capped it. The sound of running water has become a wonderful, but almost eerie silence. Now the water meter doesn’t click along that fast EVEN WHEN water is actually being used, and not at all when it’s not. Yay! One really great thing we learned via conversations with the Water Company is that, even with untold gallons pouring uselessly out of our house, we use an unusually small amount of water. It makes me happy that our efforts to be conscientious are that discernible. Still, to make it up to Mother Earth for all the wasted water we just installed low-flow shower heads, purchased via internet at: http://www.urbangreengoods.com/
Perhaps you would like to get one.
