Can you tell that I just watched a Creedence Clearwater Revival documentary (and I’m of an age to have that phrase pop into my mind)? Did you know that the CCR members got together in junior high?

But I digress. This was to be a post that follows up on the Pasture and Irrigation Renovation posts because it’s about the pasture….and rain. After NO rain in January the first few days of February were wet. We had almost 5″, with close to 2″ in one day. That doesn’t sound like a lot to people in many parts of the country but it’s a lot for our flat property. That is 1/5 of our annual 24″ in five days.

This was before the last inch of rain fell. There was a break in the rain and I walked to the south end of the property. That post with the orange flags holds one of the soil moisture sensor I mentioned in the last post.

This is the other sensor. We are not happy about the lines in the field that have become ditches. We needed to disc and seed the fields before the heavy rain in November, which was finished hours before that storm (blog post). However the irrigation pipeline work was not completely finished. That involved more traffic back and forth in the field and we have truck tracks to deal with.

Back to the barn. For those of you who have been here, you know that this is where we walk to the barn from the house. It doesn’t take much rain (well, 2″ on top of 3″ the previous days) to look like this. Thankfully our barn stays dry inside…so far.

Looking south from the barn door. Normally I’d be digging a ditch to drain the water from here to the irrigation ditch. But we don’t have an irrigation ditch anymore. We have a pipeline which will hopefully make life so much easier and more efficient in the summer.

What looks like a ditch in the foreground is where the old ditch was. Now there is a buried pipeline on the other side of that row of dirt. All of this is still settling so we don’t know what it will look like eventually. The water drains off our property from the southeast corner (near the tree in the top right corner of the photo). Dan set up a pump to take the water from the near the barn through an old pipe and over that row of dirt into the field. It seemed to work OK.

This is the view behind the barn.

Later in the afternoon I walked back to the southeast corner and brought a shovel. Like I’m going to drain this with a shovel. There is a ditch that is between the fence and the road with a culvert that takes water into the canal, and water was starting to flow under the fence here. The problem to deal with eventually is that the water flowing along the south fence line erodes the soil there as it goes under that fence into another culvert, and eventually those posts will go.

Wednesday’s total.

Yesterday was dry and sunny. Today it started raining again and that’s why the title of this post came to me.