We're going to need a baler

It is amazing just how fast grass can grow when there's a little bit of rain. A few days ago I was telling the S.O. "Don't mow yet; the forget-me-nots are still blooming." I never want to cut the grass until the forget-me-nots have had a chance to reseed. Then we had a couple wet days. Now I'm wondering how lucrative the hay market might be this year.

On the positive side, when it does stop raining and we can fire up the mowers, we're going to get a lot of mulch for the garden.We have baggers for both mowers so most grass clippings end up as compost. It does make a difference -- we have lousy soil for gardening. It's glacial till, sand and gravel, so although it drains really well it's not particularly fertile.

We have been getting a fair amount of rain this week, which is good. It was a dry Spring; I know from working in the garden that we needed a thorough, prolonged soaking rain. Not sure just what the total rainfall has been in the past 72 hours, but each time we've checked our rain gauge it's been up around at least an inch. Not Texas level rains for sure, but definitely more than a drizzle.

Speaking of Texas, I've noticed as I've listened to NPR that the dread phrase "climate change" is being spoken out loud again. For years scientists have been saying that climate change would lead to what are euphemistically referred to as "extreme weather events." That's another way of saying summers will get hotter, winters could get colder, and when it rains, it won't just rain -- it'll make you start thinking owning an ark might be a good idea.

My personal, purely anecdotal, and totally unscientific observation when it comes to rain locally is that over the past few years we seem to be experiencing more storms that remind me of monsoons --  rain coming down in sheets, truly intense rain that dumps multiple inches of water in a remarkably short time -- and less of what I'd think of as a typical U.P. rainy day, which is cold and drizzly and nasty but not especially dramatic. You know, the type of rain where you're stuck inside all day because it's too cold and wet to do yard work but then when you check the rain gauge it turns out that in 24 hours barely enough rain actually fell to cover the bottom of the gauge. Yesterday the rain was coming down in sheets, really hard intense rain, and, yep, it was measurable in inches. Definitely not typical for this part of the world. It used to be we'd get one or two storms like that per summer; now it seems to happen almost every time it rains.

In other water-related news we finally called the Health Department to set up an appointment for them to come check the water quality on the new well, the one we weren't supposed to use until they'd run the tests to make sure the water was safe to drink. You know, the well we had drilled last August and have been using water from ever since. The Health Department guy was here Tuesday, took samples, verified that the well was indeed more than the required distance from the drain field for the septic tank, and said we'd get a letter in a few days with the results of the tests. He also said we'd hear from them fast if they found something nasty. Well, the phone hasn't run and there's been nothing in the mail yet so I guess we can assume the water we've been drinking for the past 10 months isn't swarming with fecal coliform bacteria. Not that we ever thought it might be. We're in the middle of nowhere at one of the higher elevations in the state. Everyone knows that in water supplies just as in life shit never flows uphill.