Category Archives: rain

After the storm

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Up here on the mountain we have had very little rain for almost a month. The air has been very hot and humid. Walking the dogs down to the end of the driveway is enough to soak my shirt with sweat. But we have watched on the radar as strong storms surround us but generally do not give us any rain. Last Saturday a strong storm moved across town. It was visible from our front porch, but we got no rain. After the storm, the clouds were dramatic and colorful.

These formations look almost like cumulus mammatus (although some of them might, in the imaginations of some people, look like another anatomical feature). I am not certain they would qualify as cumulus mammatus because their size seems somewhat small for that. This image was taken with my iPhone.

I took this image with my Olympus camera.

Both of these images were taken towards the east, with the setting sun illuminating the underside of the storm clouds. The sunset light reflected from the clouds gave the whole world a warm, golden glow.

I grabbed a radar image off my phone to show what seems to happen to us these days.

A strong storm was moving slowly towards us, but it split, kind of like the Red Sea, and passed us by to the north and south. The pushpin shows the location of our house. We got a slight drizzle, hardly enough to dampen the ground.

The same weather app shows an 80-percent chance of rain for Thursday, the day Saturday. But we’ve seen those percentages change as the date approaches.

Parade of rainbows

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The remnants of the first named storm of the hurricane season, Alberto, passed to our west on Tuesday, bringing periodic showers. We had already had a lot of rain a few days ago that was not associated with the storm, but with the tropical air mass we have had for some time.

Tuesday evening, there were small, isolated showers passing all around us. We looked out the front door and saw rain falling over town, plus a rainbow. The rainbow dissipated as the shower moved to the north, but it was followed by another shower, and another rainbow. This is a series of images I took as the showers and rainbows paraded by over town.


The rain was falling in bands, so the rainbows themselves were banded.

Although the weather forecasters expected a lot of rain from the storm, we got very little. Fortunately, with the earlier, heavy rain from a few days ago, we have pretty much caught up on precipitation for a while. I have been trying to prepare the furthest reaches of our front yard for planting grass. Now the ground will be far too muddy to work for several days. That’s OK, because I need to do some more work in the house anyway.

Thursday Sky

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We had a nice shower Thursday evening, the first rain we’ve had in, well, I can’t remember. A long time. The temperature dropped 20 degrees to 64F in just a few minutes. We had a high of 89F on Thursday, according to our thermometer. It’s supposed to reach into the mid-90s by the weekend.

We ended up with a half an inch of rain, and a rainbow.

The fainter, secondary bow was visible. I zoomed to try to get a better shot.

 

Rain watch

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I have mentioned before that a fair number of trees in the woods around here died between last summer and this spring. The forest doesn’t look healthy. A lot of trees of all species on the mountain either never came back in the spring or barely made it out of the winter alive. Even the trees that seem less affected by the heat and drought of last summer don’t seem to have leafed out as much as in a normal year, at least to my uneducated eye.

Some trees are trying. A few pines whose needles all turned brown have come back in part. Some of the trees whose limbs never leafed out have sprouted tight bunches of leaves along their trunks. I suspect many of them will never fully recover and will eventually die, especially if we have another summer like 2016.

One of the hardest hit of species is the dogwood. As far as I could tell earlier this spring, we had only one or two dogwoods that seemed to have survived in reasonably good condition. This is one that grew just inside the woods next to our driveway.

Some vines have grown up into the crown, which makes it look like it still has leaves, but the only leaves on this tree are dead. But this is what I noticed at the base of the tree on Wednesday.

It’s coming back from the roots. It looks pretty good at this point.

Here’s a maple that lost about half of its multiple trunks.

And here’s its base.

I don’t know whether the dogwoods or maples will manage to survive, despite these signs of their struggle to live.

This die-off may be a normal cycle in the northwestern Georgia forest, but I worry.

I also worry about our front yard. I finally got the zoysia seed sown. I filled the ruts and depressions as well as I could, then spread about two inches of rich topsoil. Then I raked it as level as I could, which was not very level. Then I rolled it. Every place I stepped ended up with a deep footprint. I could and probably should have tried harder to get the lawn smooth, but I was racing what I thought was a nice downpour that never materialized.

Now all we have to do is make sure the seed doesn’t get too dry. I have watered lightly – very lightly – twice so far. Our well doesn’t produce at a very high rate, so I am being conservative when I water. I am sprinkling about a third of the lawn at a time, then waiting a few hours before doing the next third. Here you can see the middle third is slightly darker than the ground on either side, a result of watering just a short while before I took the picture.

As I write this on Wednesday afternoon, there is a wide area of rain heading from the southwest up towards us. Based on our history here, I won’t be surprised if we get little or nothing from this system.

Preparing to watch the grass grow

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Leah and I both want a nice yard with lots of pretty shrubbery. Although we don’t particularly want a large lawn, our front yard is also our septic system leach field, so we don’t have many options for ground cover. It looks like it’s going to be grass.

The first decision was what type of grass to grow. The county agricultural extension agent immediately suggested Bermuda grass, because it’s fast growing, it spreads, and it’s drought resistant. Fast growing means it has to be mowed often, and I really, really don’t want to mow a lawn every week, or even twice a week. The other option was zoysia grass. Zoysia is slow growing and drought resistant. Slow growing is great for less mowing, or, depending on how you want your yard to look, no mowing at all. But slow growing also means it takes a while to establish, unless you buy sod. Sod would require regular, deep watering, while seed would require regular, shallow watering (at least at first). In the end we decided to try to seed the lawn with zoysia..

I picked a very hot, dry day to start raking the middle 3000 square feet in front of the house to clear the wheat straw and rocks. Then I dug into a pile of dirt the grading contractor left in the front yard to fill the low spots and gullies. I shoveled the dirt into the bed of our Mule, a side-by-side four-wheeler, and hauled it to where it was needed. The pile probably had about five cubic yards of dirt, all of which I moved with a shovel.

Next I had about nine cubic yards of mushroom compost delivered. It also had to be shoveled into the Mule’s little bed so I could spread it about an inch deep everywhere we plan to seed. Once that’s done, I’ll rent a big tiller and try to incorporate it into the soil.

Here’s the mule resting, while I supervise from the porch. The compost is piled to the right of the Mule.

Filling in the low spots and spreading the compost took most of three days, all of which were sunny and near 90 F.

Most of the topsoil was removed from the front yard during construction, leaving us with sandy clay with lots of rock but absolutely no organic material. I’ll till the compost into the soil, but it will still need to be augmented with some decent topsoil, so I had 18 cubic yards delivered on Wednesday afternoon.

We were having a little problem getting the last of the soil to slide out of the dumptruck, and I joked that at least it was easier than shoveling it all out. Then it occurred to me that I actually am going to have to move all those 18 cubic yards with a shovel.

At this point, Thursday night, I still have a little compost left to spread. Although nine cubic yards will cover almost 3000 square feet at one inch depth, I think I’m going to end up covering around 2500 square feet.

This is the yard with most of the compost spread.

The shadow of the house makes it look like we have rich, black soil, but that’s an illusion. The red clay above the darker compost slopes down so it doesn’t look like as large an area as it actually is.

The next steps are tilling the compost into the ground, spreading two inches of topsoil, and then sowing the zoysia seed.

As of Thursday, I don’t have the topsoil spread, or the seed sown. The zoysia seed must be kept moist for about three weeks. Regular gentle showers would be nice once the seed is sown, but I don’t want rain right now. So Thursday afternoon a large line of thunderstorms formed and was moving towards us from Alabama. Fortunately, I had put plastic over the topsoil and the remaining compost, just in case.

This is what it looked like as the rain moved across Alabama. The red push pin is our house.It looked like we were in for some heavy rain.

A little while after this radar image was made, the sky darkened and the wind picked up and began to roar through Fouche Gap. Rain began to fall. The plastic over the compost and topsoil started flapping and I had to put more rocks along the sides. I retreated back inside and waited for the rain. A little while after that, this is what the radar looked like.

It looks like we’re in some fairly heavy rain, but we weren’t. The sea of red had parted and passed on either side of us.

And then, after the line of thunderstorms had passed, this is what it looked like.

We had 0.06 inches of rain.

Here’s the front yard after the rain passed. Instead of water, it mostly deposited leaves torn from the trees.

On the plus side, the temperature dropped from near 90 F to 68 F in about fifteen minutes.