no rain, no rainbows

I looked west this morn­ing while I was hav­ing break­fast and saw the first rain­bow I’ve seen in months, maybe years. Although it was cool out­side I had to go up to the deck to check it out. The rain­bow was just a short piece of an arc ris­ing from the ocean, but in this land of lit­tle rain you take what you get.

The rain­bow was just about the last offi­cial act of a set of four con­sec­u­tive storms that deliv­ered over six days almost as much mois­ture as we received all of last year. And by “storms” I do mean real storms with rain, hail, thun­der, light­ning and tree-toppling winds. But for most of us in town things went as well as could be expected.

At work euca­lyp­tus trees cracked and fell, build­ings leaked, flows of water and mud threat­ened to invade sev­eral build­ings. Walk­ing out­side entailed wad­ing through pud­dles or jump­ing from one high spot to another.

At home power flick­ered on and off a few times. The back yard laked up briefly, but noth­ing that looked like it was going to come in the house.

Hail came down a cou­ple times, but noth­ing was hurt. These pel­lets were about the size of peas.

Rain was heavy. These lit­tle buck­ets to catch roof runoff were full within the first 24 hours.

A pot­ted Kalan­choe pro­lif­era on the roof deck–seen here on the right–blew over. While the base must weigh 75 pounds when soak­ing wet, the plant is tall and proved no match for the blasts of wind that came through. This photo was shot after the plant was righted, so you can see it wasn’t both­ered by spend­ing some time sideways.

A sur­vey this morn­ing showed the trays of bog plants full of water, flood­ing the pots. These swamp dwellers are adapted to a lit­tle flood­ing, and in some areas peo­ple over­win­ter the rhi­zomes under­wa­ter so they don’t rot.

In fact, the par­rot pitcher plant from the Florida-Georgia area, Sar­race­nia psittacina, can be found com­pletely sub­merged over the win­ter. Its traps are unique in that they’re adapted to catch­ing swim­ming as well as crawl­ing crea­tures, so it’ll find some­thing to eat, whether under­wa­ter or above.

The cul­vert in city ease­ment behind the house filled with water. It makes me want to estab­lish a lit­tle ver­nal pool in the muck at the bot­tom. I won­der if it would work in this loca­tion. Some of the most endan­gered plants in my area can be found around ver­nal pools and nowhere else.

The cool­ing weather and moister weather greens up the plants that have been dor­mant through the dry sea­son. In the back Core­op­sis gigan­tea leaves begin to sprout on what had been lit­tle brown trunks. But in the fore­ground you see all the weeds that accom­pany the sea­son. These are mostly seedlings of a few mizuna plants, a Japan­ese mus­tard green, that I let go to seed a decade ago.

…and when life gives you young, weedy, ten­der mizuna sprouts, why not pick mizuna greens? These will be in tonight’s salad.

So you can see we came through pretty well. The main casu­alty was Scooter, the cat, who’s used to occa­sional times out­side to sun her­self. I think the “Can I go out­side, please?” expres­sion is pretty clear on her face here.

She did get to go out this morn­ing, at last, and so did I. While I appre­ci­ate the rain, a lit­tle respite between storms doesn’t hurt, both for cats and humans alike. It also gives the water­logged ground to dry out a bit or to let the water seep down farther.

If the weather fore­casts are right, we’ll be get­ting another storm on Tues­day, but it won’t be any­thing like the almost con­tin­u­ous rain we just had. After 3 years of bad drought, we’ll take what­ever rain falls, even if we don’t get any more rain­bows with it.

January 23 2010 02:35 pm | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • •

5 Responses to “no rain, no rainbows”

  1. George on 23 Jan 2010 at 4:16 pm #

    I saw some smoth­ered rain­bows too.

    Water cap­ture: my roof has a “V” sec­tion that fun­nels too much water for the rain gut­ter to fully accom­mo­date so I put a plas­tic 33-gallon trash bar­rel under­neath the spillage to catch it. One filled within an hour. Instead of drain­ing the rain gut­ter onto the dri­ve­way which slopes down to the street, I divert it to the top of the small adja­cent grav­elly slope where cypress trees and junipers grow. That small slope ends at the street but I’ve never seen much excess drainage to the street so most of the runoff from that gut­ter ends up under­ground I think. I never water those plants dur­ing the year.

    <Dream>
    I wouldn’t mind another week-long storm series like this, maybe one for Feb­ru­ary, one for March, and one more in April. Then top it off with a few light show­ers in May.
    </Dream>

    (apolo­gies if that attempt at dis­play­ing html markup didn’t work)

  2. tina on 23 Jan 2010 at 4:48 pm #

    No rain­bows in years? I couldn’t imag­ine it. I’m glad you got some rain even if it caused a few prob­lem. Rain is good for us gardeners.

  3. Susie on 23 Jan 2010 at 9:12 pm #

    Rain, rain come again…we had a ton up here too, but we’ll gladly take more. After the storm goes though…nothing like it.

  4. Brad B on 24 Jan 2010 at 10:12 am #

    Yeah we had quite a week of rain up north as well. I was for­tu­nate to see a dou­ble full arc rain­bow over the city 2 days ago. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t have my cam­era with me. We’ve used gray water in the past to water orna­men­tals, but we are not catch­ing rain water, and I don’t know why not. Maybe I can hook some­thing up before the next storm.

  5. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » into the wild on 25 Jan 2010 at 6:31 am #

    […] my last lit­tle out­ing to my city’s largest open-space park, before the recent rains, while I wasn’t busy look­ing at sycamores, I was head­ing up the trail to For­tuna Peak, one of […]

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