rainwater harvesting | 2greenthumbs's Weblog

My goodness gracious. It has been so hot and DRY lately, things are dying all around us. Lawns are brown, trees are loosing their leaves, the people are wilting themselves. Team WWOOF is so bored, I can tell. They spend a lot of time, all day usually, watering. You see with the CSA, we can’t let things die on us. Our customers are depending on a crop. Let me rephrase that. We could totally let it ALL die and the customer would have to understand, because they signed a piece of paper, and something like drought is part of the liability. But we’re too nice, and since we have a lot of help and it’s too hot to do much else, we put a hose in their hand. It’s funny, because as I type this out, it is currently raining. The rain, which has only been going on for about 20 minutes or so has prompted me to write about the dryness, because I’ve been needing to. One of our CSA members asked me the other day how things were growing. I let him know how tough it’s been and how some things are just wilting away. He totally understood if the bags were empty for the next few weeks. He shared the story of his garden with me. He said he and his wife had been gone for three weeks. Even though they had someone watering it for them, they returned and their garden was dust. This “heat wave” that the weather man has talked about has lasted for two months now. It’s more like a heat tsunami! This wave won’t leave. I guess my message to you dear reader is respect the fact that there is produce at your grocery store, and there are many, MANY factors that go into its survival. Uh oh, the rain knew I was talking about it, it just stopped : (

Last week a series of thunderstorms rolled through these parts of Arkansas and beyond. Tornadoes touched down further south across several states, the hardest hit being Mississippi and Alabama. Up here, it rained 10″ in 24 hours. The next day more rain fell, causing flash floods in NWA. On the farm, the rain washed down our footpath to our house, which is its natural draining pattern, and washed over my bed which was planted with carrots. It washed over it so much, that eventually cut channels through the bed, washing the soil into the onion bed. We tried to alleviate some of the damage by putting straw bales into the path of the water, but when thousands of gallons are running off of a large roof over a matter of hours, you just can’t compete. We tried, but it did no good. It was interesting talking to some of the farmer’s at the Fayetteville Farmer’s Market today, listening to their stories of what the rain washed away. One farmer said it washed his topsoil away. Another mentioned, how his topsoil didn’t leave his property, but that it had washed to the bottom of the hill. That’s something to think about, right. Your dirt. And how important it is. Treat it well.