Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Whew, that was a blast!

An unusually wet and wild storm for October pounded us yesterday. This morning's paper said that Carmel Valley got 2.65 inches of rain as of 5:00 PM yesterday and I know that plenty of rain fell yesterday evening. The wind was whipping everything around and here's what I found when I had a chance to check the vegetable garden this morning...

Thursday update: I checked the rainfall total for Wednesday through 5:00 PM and it showed an additional 1.4 inches of rain which fell mostly Tuesday evening (barely a trace of rain all day yesterday) so the storm total was 4.05 inches!

The amaranth that had been reaching for the sky is now blocking the main path.

The pole beans were well anchored except for one side of one trellis.

The top heavy Portuguese kale is no longer upright, lucky for it the broccoli plants had less of a tendency to lean over.

The seed heads on the Red Florence fennel are growing horizontally now.

Looking back from the other direction makes the landscape look a bit askew. The direction that the wind was blowing from is obvious.

Eggplant and pepper plants with a decided lean.

Tilting tomato towers. It's a good thing that I firmly anchored one row of towers, these ones weren't so well done and are leaning onto the other row.

I was being watched the whole time I was photographing the garden by this small family of quail, there's a male hiding behind the first bird.

Yesterday would have been a great day to get caught up on my tomato preserving. Unfortunately I only had time to put up one batch of canned tomatoes before I had to hit the road for Palo Alto, it was not a fun drive.

18 comments:

  1. What a wonderful garden! Looks like it survived the storm well.

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  2. OMG Michelle it looks really bad! You must be devastated, what a mess. I feel for you and hope you can save some of it.
    xoxo Tyra

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  3. Oh, I am sorry for your Amaranthus. But I bet the garden appreciated the rain. Carmel is one my favorite places to visit and your vegetable garden is beautiful, even when wet.

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  4. flowrgirl1, thanks! I think it came through ok.

    Tyra, it looks a lot worse than it is, I think, I hope. Lots of plants are leaning but I don't think anything is uprooted. The amaranth may be done for though, it's leaning a bit too far.

    azplantlady, thank you! Actually, I think the garden is most beautiful when it's wet, it all looks so fresh then. The amaranth isn't such a huge loss, I was hoping to save some seeds but still have plenty from previous years.

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  5. Don't you just hate when the storm hits when your plants are at their biggest. We got a couple of windy storms in late summer. Luckily nothing really fell. I had to prop up some tomato cages and used some string to keep my poles for my beans up. But it all worked out in the end. I hope your plants survive it all.

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  6. Daphne, It was a bit frustrating to see that this morning, so unusual for this time of year. I think most of the plants can be righted, staked or propped up to get them through for a while.

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  7. Yep, that was quite a storm. And I'll be out of town for the weekend, so the mess will just have to wait until I'm back. Still, I'm always amazed at how resilient the plants are...With some stakes and a bit of pruning, things often right themselves.

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  8. The quail are beautiful, nice shot!

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  9. it seems your plants have survived the storm...maybe little bit of more work and time will get them back in shape. good luck!

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  10. Town Mouse, you're right - if the roots are ok and the plant isn't too damaged they usually do ok. I'm just a little bit short on stakes right now.

    Dan, thanks! Those little cuties were quite obliging about having their picture taken.

    Urban Green, I think it won't take too much work to straighten things out and it seems that the weather is going to oblige for the next 10 days or so...

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  11. The damage doesn't look as bad as it could have been, so I hope things recover for you.

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  12. Michelle, you have a serious garden there! Even afterstorm pictures show how much of good stuff you grow there! The picture with the water drops on the brunches is awesome!

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  13. Jan, I was out straightening things this morning and it looks like most of it will be ok.

    Tatyana, thanks! Sometime I wonder if I have a serious addiction to gardening :) But we do eat a lot of good vegetables around here!

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  14. Wow, what a storm! I suppose the rain will be good for the garden, but wind is so destructive. It looks as though most things will survive, luckily, thanks to your careful planting and supporting. We find the worst thing an autumn storm does is wash away our seedlings of winter vegetables - this happened a couple of weeks ago here and we're still trying to catch up with very late spinach seedlings!

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  15. Wow. That is a LOT of rain and wind. So sorry about the amaranth, but glad those tomato plants seem to be okay. It would just about break my heart not see the harvest photos of those.

    And I agree with you about how pretty the garden looks after rain...

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  16. Hope your veggies do OK after the storm. Your photo of the quail is really cute.

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  17. Four inches here too. The kale was all over the place and I've been eating the leaning leaves. The most exciting thing was having seeds in-ground before the rain hit. Like they were called, they all popped up.

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  18. They got 11 inches in Boulder Creek where my daughter lives and I hear that over 20 inches fell someplace in the Santa Cruz mountains!! I have to get our rain gauge set up - I expect we got at least 5 inches. Glad you came through OK - a "test run" for the bigger storms to come perhaps!

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