When It Rains, It Pours!

The shot above was taken by one of our volunteers (Kristine) this past Sunday. We had a combined 4" of rain over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The plus side of this is that we wont have to do much watering for the week, the drawback is that most of that precipitation came down fast and hard. This resulted in flooding as seen above which came over our main path and flooded some beds. There were also many "washouts" on our gravel paths and branches down because of the typhoon winds. A couple dry days with sun should perk the gardens up which currently look beaten up. See another shot to the left. This water has since drained away but Kristine thought that the last 2" of rain came in a 25 minute period on Sunday. So much for a soaking drizzle! We'll take what we can get though...

The gardens are still looking quite nice and colorful. We're still doing plenty of weeding but are shifting to some deadheading and snipping back on the annual collections to keep them looking good thru the rest of the season. The fence crew Grumpies were here again and had the help of two new volunteers. They continue their march towards completion and the end result will look very professional. Ed, Ron, Ron W., Del and Bill worked on cleaning up washouts and collecting debris from the storms. Urban, Rose and Kathy continued to work on prepping/cleaning benches and repainting the engraved lettering on these special benches (of which there are 54!). The carpenters worked on benches and obelisks and we had the help of Joyce and Shirley for weeding. Marianne has been tidying her various collections and continues to give the irises much needed attention. Marv and Terry worked on path repair, edging and other various duties around the grounds. It's one of the few Mondays that they don't have to set up sprinklers or water containers. Little Jerry has been pruning around the gardens and Larry is getting back in to the flow after his week off. Dr. Gredler continues to me a "mowing fixture" around here and will need to keep up with the flush of rain-induced turf that will flourish shortly. I'll be away from blogging for two days as I have a neat trip out to Philadelphia and will be able to see some top notch botanical gardens including Chanticleer, Longwood and the Scott Arboretum. I'll be taking lots of pictures! Enjoy picture below of the reception garden, wishing well garden, herb garden and formal annual garden respectively.