I spent the entire weekend in the garden, cutting back, harvesting, watering, tidying up, prepping a seed bed and spreading finished compost that was 8 or 9 months in the making. 4 hours after I wrapped up on Sunday, the skies opened up and we had a deluge of near-Biblical proportion. All that beautiful compost was swiftly washed away, despite my attempts to build brick retaining walls around the beds I thought were in jeopardy (we had a similar storm a few days ago that did the same thing). This after I found a tomato and cucumber plant severed at ground level, squirrel-raided tomato plants, squash vine borer damage on 90% of the vines, and every single sunflower stalk broken about 4 or 5 feet above ground (I stake them with sturdy 5' bamboo poles but they grow to 7 or 8' - birds obliterated the seed heads even before most of the seeds were fully developed).

Needless to say, I've lost quite a bit of enthusiasm for starting my fall garden.

Wow, sorry to hear about that. Are the rains related to hurricanes? We are in drought as usual, but at least I have city water.

At least you will have a sort of compost tea on your beds. My friends grows very short sunflowers that still get seed heads, wonder if those might work better for your.

Don't give up - the very definition of garden is making things grow in spite of everything nature throws at us.

Maggie

Bummer!

I agree with Maggie, though. Don't give up.

Oh, Matt-choo...sorry! Keep the faith!

Peace

Gail

We had those type of wash outs last year and it is soooo discouraging. Take a few days off to consider what bounty you've already reaped and regroup. Consider what you could do differently or better. Most importantly: don't cave in...you'll end up, even if only temporarily, hating yourself.

Bummer, Matt! I agree with the others, hang in there.

quote:

don't cave in...

Ha! It's too late for that – the water carved a gulch under the back fence and undermined a couple potato plants which fell over. Of course, on the upside, I harvested some really nice taters!

You'd think if the city of Charlotte is going to funnel all the storm water from the neighborhood into a culvert which empties behind my property, they could at least carve a channel for that water to flow through rather than let it flood into my yard. But then, this is the city that experienced 4 water main breaks in 24 hrs recently and where you can't drive half a mile without running into detours, lane & street closures, utility crews, construction zones. Obviously, they can be trusted to do anything right.

Matt, where I grew up, we called the city work crew the Teaspoon Brigade. The joke was that if any of them got caught shoveling any more than a teaspoon of dirt at a time, they were fired. Those guys milked a one day job into a week all the time.

Matt, So sorry to hear of this. I hope things will look better when they dry out. Sounds like Wilmington and Charlotte have a lot in common

Thanks Barb! Most of the plants were not affected - I'm over my angst and eager to get out this weekend to build some walls around the beds. Have wanted to do that anyway to create raised beds, so I'm choosing to look upon this positively as a motivator for me to "git 'er done."

My broccoli, collards, rapini, kale, leek, spinach, arugula, cabbage, radicchio, parsnip, mizuna, mache and tatsoi seeds are in transit now for my fall garden! I'll be nice to have those crops to look forward to, even as I'm reaping the harvest from the summer veggies and herbs!

I'm sorry to hear about your loss.

I am always amazed at how the old time prairie people did it. They had no weather forecast for frosts or storms. Sometime locust would eat it all. No plastic or wire deer fences or bird nets and row covers. Yet they still lived somehow.

When we fail we can drive to the store and buy our food. I think most of us modern wussies would die if we had to do what they did?

What are you planting to replace the destroyed plants?

Great photo, Allen. Is there a story there?