They Call The Wind Mariah....

It sprinkled rain on and off all day yesterday. Around six p.m. I heard some thunder and asked my husband if he thought we'd get some significant rain, and he said "Naah."

Ten minutes later a wind from the north came roaring up, the air turned a strange shade of gray, and the rain came down in buckets. By the time it was over:

a patio chair was in the pond,
the patio umbrella had been snapped in two,
my formerly proud peppers, chard and kale were bowed to the ground,
the upstairs floors (where we had left the windows open one inch) had to be mopped,
the garden cart was in the woods, 75' from where I had left it.

This morning we finished filling the second raised bed with topsoil, added compost, and I planted beans. They should be ready for picking by late September, and with luck, we'll make it. The beans are the last planting of the 2010 vegetable garden. Everything else is already producing. We've been eating tomatoes; the banana peppers are lengthening and thickening; the zucchini are converting dirt into food at an amazing speed; even the reluctant eggplants are setting fruit. As for the kale and chard, I picked four pounds of the stuff for the food bank today and you can't even tell they've been harvested.

All this on nine 4'x4' squares. There's nothing like intensive gardening!