Rain…rain…and more rain
(The Flood - Katie Melua)
It’s raining.
Again.
Well, actually, it has barely stopped since oh… I forget. End of September?
Everything is soaked, the fields are waterlogged, the ponds have turned into lakes and what used to be a stream, is now a great big river.
And yet, I don’t resent it as much as I might have a few years ago.
We needed the rain. Maybe not quite as uninterrupted, but we did need it.
Well, we needed rain, and we got a deluge.
My poor ninja chickens would like me to build an ark for them. They don’t like wet feet, and right now it’s impossible to take a dust bath…because there’s no dry dust or dirt to be found anywhere near them. (I’m planning to put a sandbox in there, but it would get flooded no doubt.)
I had a lake in the chicken pen. Not a puddle. A lake.
This almost reached the door.
Luckily we moved the chicken house a few days earlier, because it was sitting right in the middle of this.
I ended up digging a trench to drain it, but even that didn’t help the whole time.
Meanwhile, the pond was filling up rapidly.
As did the fields…
The horses were mired in mud, and I ended up slapping down paddock grids so they weren’t standing knee-deep in mud soup.
I didn’t take “Before” pics, but this is after I put down 2 rows of grids for them.
This was on the 1st November. The soup is worse now, but the grids are holding.
Alas, I put a hay net into the field shelter (which also has grids on the floor) and they stand at the hay box… wanting to be fed there with loose hay, instead.
They haven’t used to field shelter much, because of the noise of rain on the roof. Instead they stand in the rain and tough it out.
Squeaky — not to be outdone — has decided that rain and wind are horrible, and it’s much nicer to come in and hang out in front of the fire.
So yeah, we’re all a bit fed up with the rain now.
I think we’ve had our quota now.
Time to turn off the tap for a while.
