Land of a Thousand Lakes

No, not Minnesota, but Sweet Bay Farm and surrounding areas. At the present time we have a swollen creek and small lakes and ponds everywhere.

The neighbors have a little fishing pond just out of sight behind the trees to the right in this picture; the banks of the pond got washed out in Hurricane Floyd, so every time we get rain the lower part of their horse pasture goes under water. This is only a very small part of the neighbor's horse pasture; it goes up a steep hill and extends a few hundred years to the neighbor's house.

We got a ton of rain on Friday, so much so that the creek gauge about 15 miles from us got up to almost 10 feet on Saturday evening. By Sunday evening the swell had reached us. I took this picture at the end of the shelter paddock at 8 o'clock this morning. This is looking down the grass road that winds down to the creek. Everything past the shelter paddock is in the floodway.

The shelter paddock itself is dry; the water level would need to be at least 3 feet higher for this paddock to go under. Usually we need at least 8" of rain at once (and upstream) in order to get a flood of that magnitude, where the water comes up beyond the floodway and covers everything.

The area by the gate of the electric tape paddock was under water when we went to bring up the horses last night.

There is a drainage slough between the two pastures.

The low parts of this paddock are under water too.

The horses were acting freaked out by the ice skating crows, and by what sounded like a bobcat fight in the neighbor's woods (my own cats were safe sleeping on the back porch), although not freaked out enough to forgo rolling in the mud.

Ice in the ditch next to the horse pasture. Typically the water is only a third that high.

The water comes up fast, but it goes down fast too. By 11 am the water had already drained away from around the gate.

In this picture you can see how much the water between the two pastures has gone down. The swell will probably be gone by tomorrow morning, which is a good thing because we're expecting more rain.

In the spirit of helping to highlight other blogs, I offer Cake Wrecks. It's not a gardening blog and doesn't need any promotion but it's freakin hilarious. I found it through Dreamybee's blog Subliminal Intervention. Dreambee lives in Hawaii and posts pictures of beautiful tropical plants and flowers, so going to her blog is like going on a mini-vacation. :)