Saving Your Garden from Torrential Rain

Last year, around the end of summer, there was a big storm that formed off the coast of Baja California. We saw it on the Weather Channel. We live in the Midwest, and we had no reason to believe that storm could possibly come our way, but it did, and it came with a vengeance that we'd never seen with weather before.

In just a few days time, we had over 11 plus inches of rain, come down on all of us. We were frightened, but then I remembered my dad. When I was a young teenager, we had some frightful downpours. My dad dressed up, and he went outside with a spade, a fork, a shovel, whatever was needed, and he dug and dug for his life and ours. He made a kind of trench, that directed the water away from our home.

This is what I did this last late summer. My trench was no where near the width that my dad dug. I used a garden hoe, and I made the trench as deep and wide as it needed to be. The trench needed to be about two inches wide. I also dug the trench deep, so that the water could spill away from the house, down the trench, and out into the yard. It was only a few inches deep, just enough to get the job done.

I had a pumpkin patch with four sunflowers at one end of it, that I was especially proud of, and the pumpkin plants seemed fine, but the sunflowers were saturated and drooping from the torrential rains. I knew they wouldn't make it, so I dug and dug, and I pulled mud up onto the land. I dug little tiny islands around all of the sunflowers, and pulled mud and muck up around onto the land, in a way that the rain wouldn't get back to the sunflowers or pumpkin plants. Even though my dad was in heaven, I knew I was doing the right thing, it's what my dad would have done to save the plants.

When I first faced those torrential rains, I was scared. I dressed up like a person in a snowstorm. But I grabbed a garden hoe, and I faced it, and I made it through the storm. I kept thinking of my dad, and how he cut something like a gully into the landscape to drain the rain away. What my dad made was a whole lot bigger than what I made, but what I made was big enough to drain the rain away, and save all of us.

Even though we had about 11 inches of rain or more, we never got drowned by it, our home was safe, but we were never the same again. I am truly thankful that I went through the experience of my dad creating a drainage system during a big rainstorm, otherwise, I may not have known to start digging with a garden hoe.

I am truly thankful that even though we might get a lot of rain, it can safely be diverted with a simple garden hoe. God Bless Thriftyfun!

By Carol Rodriguez from South Bend, IN