Water From The Sky-edited 10/1

Yes, we needed water.   It is POURING down.  In the dark, so impossible to really judge, but we do have a metal roof and so do the poor horses, w/o insulation.   Rags couldn’t care less, but Tigger hates loud noise.   I put out hay in the barn, but dunno if he’ll stay in or not.   We saw the storm building up from miles and miles away and knew it was not going to be the soft gentle rain I most wanted for the burned area.  This is hard rain and plenty of it.  The big red patches came right over us; one is still on the other side of town.

That’s all I can say for now, because it’s dark, and pouring, and I’m not going out in it.   Will edit and update this tomorrow.

{I meant to, but…yesterday was a tough day in the health dept…overlapping immunizations + having foolishly gone out and hiked around on the burn scar in the heat before the storm finally came…without taking water along, or eating anything before deciding to just go see what it was like.]

So: MORE water from the sky late last night, Yay!!.  The First rain, about an inch and a half overall, had a hard-driven component that worried me, but the crust of burnt stuff acted almost like one of those anti-erosion-blanket things, plus the ground had cracked open in a lot of places.   In fact, we saw a few determined green sprouts from the least charred remnants of grass clumps.  By no means all of them, but some.  The oaks, however, looked much worse.  Now there are more little green leaves from the merely brown-scorched grass clumps, as well as the re-greening of grasses not touched by fire.  I’ve ordered a “midway” seed mix from Native American Seed, a source for native prairie plants, after chatting with their staff about recovery from hot wildfires.  (Yes, as opposed to “cool” wildfires, which don’t heat the soil enough to kill off the seeds in the soil.)   I’m also going to order more forbs.  Should have done all that last week, but other stuff intervened.

It’s cloudy, dripping, and supposed to rain some more.  Last night’s was either a half inch or six tenths, depending on which gauge.  Storm rain around here is *very* local.    I’ll add more updates when and as more rain develops over today/tomorrow.

12 thoughts on “Water From The Sky-edited 10/1

    1. Most of it sank in; what landed on the house, barn, and rain-barn roofs did indeed put water in the collecting tanks. YAY for that. More rain due tonight (maybe this afternoon but only 30% chance), tomorrow and Saturday all day and night at higher %s. I hope we come out of this with topped-up tanks.

  1. Even gentle rain can sound torrential on the roof – I know that in the motor home we are sometimes misled into thinking that the rain is heavier than it is.

    I hope the current rain will fill your tanks and not all run off.

    1. Our rain barns have 400 square feet of collection area, with two gutters, one each side, leading to the storage tanks. The figure we were given was a yield of 600 gallons per 1000 feet of roof area. Wind direction makes a difference, as does the pitch of the roof, and some rain bounces off (in a hard rain, or wind-blown.) We have 1200 gallons of storage at Fox, and 5000 gallons at Cloud and Owl. (Could get a truck to them carrying 2500 gallon tanks.) The barn has 2500 gallon tanks. This kind of storage is not typical here; what most people call their tank (cattle tank is another term) is an earthen structure: a dam to collect runoff in a specially dug reservoir. They lose more to evaporation than our system does, but then our system would not serve a herd of cattle. It does water one to two horses (the barn tanks) and wildlife.

      The burn scar, looked at a couple of days post fire, showed us that the ground had been very dry with deep cracks in the soil. Yesterday’s visit, post rain, showed that a lot of the rain had soaked in, mostly by running into the cracks…which is good. Some grass tufts, burnt black to the ground, now had one or two tiny green leaves. Many showed nothing. The black and ash gray crust remained crusty. (BTW, if you get two immunizations the same day, going out to walk around in a burn scar in the sun and humidity…not so smart. Learn from my mistake!)

  2. The Weather Channel says Texas is due several slugs of tropical moisture for the next week which should clear up the beginnings of drought.

    1. As often happens, our rain chances went away as the various air masses slightly changed direction, and their bumping into each other (which is what brought the T-storms) happened somewhere else. We’re now back to medium-hot, dry, no rain on the forecast. Nothing yesterday or today so far and I don’t see much chance of even a late-afternoon shower.

      R- lost a hearing aid while out on the land, and this is a problem because he can’t hear rattlesnakes buzz unless he has both of them in. He pushes his glasses up to wipe sweat off his forehead, and this can bump the hearing aid out from behind his ear. Learning *not* to do that–push up the glasses–would be really hard; he’s been doing it for so many years.

  3. For the last three days when I went to check your blog I got the inaccessable note. Is it weather problems or general server problems where you are?

    1. I don’t have a clue, sorry. For the last 3-4 days I was having trouble emailing people I’d emailed before but didn’t have any problem reaching websites. I wouldn’t think the weather’s been bad enough, but I just don’t know. When I had everything hosted in NTX, I could usually raise techsupport there and they’d know what was going on, but now my hosting service is in Canada. Sorry you had problems, though.

    1. I hadn’t thought of that, Joan. I tend to think of wet soil as mitigating heat, and drying out as doing more damage…hmmmmm. How do mycelia feel about drying out?

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