Now that Spring is supposed to be well bedded in, we could do with a bit of sunshine to speed up the plants after all the rain last week. But things didn’t really work out like that.
On Sunday 19th we were planning to visit an azalea garden on display, but we drove back to Dahlonega from Duluth through a heavy rainstorm and the gardens were closed due to the weather.
We arrived home in the early afternoon, and a real storm started, complete with thunder and lightning. Inside a couple of hours, more than two inches fell. Added to the totally saturated ground from the previous week, problems were inevitable.
Water started rushing off the hillsides, and the end of the Great Wall of Dahlonega turned into a small waterfall. The picture doesn’t really do the gusher at the end of the planter bed credit, but I estimated the water flow at 10 gallons (45 litres) per second! The rush of water was augmented by a spring which suddenly started pumping out water.
Even after the rain stopped, the gusher continued, and the flow didn’t reduce for at least six hours.
With all the sodden ground, it was inevitable that other things would happen. Sure enough, at 8pm the electricity went off as a tree somewhere in the neighbourhood topped and took down the overhead power lines. 400 homes without power were reported on the outage page of our electricity company. It took three hours to get things back to norm. We are looking forward to the weather and the ground drying out enough for our friendly electrician to be able to install the standby generator we have ordered.
Another lesson from the rainstorm and waterfall is that soil erosion could be a real problem at the end of the retaining wall. I have decided that my next big garden project is to line the banks of the slope with rocks to make a “dry creek bed” to divert the flow safely. With a bit of help from Ricky (the all-terrain vehicle which figured on the Xmas card 2013) I have moved about a ton of rocks to the project site. And there is the same again to go, I suspect.
All the wet weather has had at least one beneficial effect – once the sun started shining and things started to warm up, we had some interesting plant finds. The driveway in front of the house offered a few blooms last years, dogwoods, native azaleas and rhododendrons. But not much of a show.
However, since then there has been a significant amount of ground clearing, and previously shady spots receive a lot more sunlight. This has been reflected in a much bigger display, as this picture of native azaleas shows.