A rainy recipe for disaster

The scurs were counting on the Weather Eye to bring us a nice weekend forecast. At least they got the cloudy part right. Are we done with heavy rains for now or do we get an encore this week? Starting Thursday, mostly cloudy with a good chance of rain. Highs in the low 60’s with lows in the low 50’s. Mostly cloudy Friday with a fair chance of evening rain. Highs in the low 60’s with lows in the mid-50’s. Mostly cloudy on Saturday with a good chance of rain. Highs in the low 60’s with lows in the mid-50’s. Sunday, partly sunny with a fair chance of evening showers. Highs in the upper 60’s with lows in the low 50’s. Partly sunny on Monday with a slight chance of rain. Highs near 70 with lows in the low 50’s. Tuesday, sunny with highs in the mid-60’s and lows in the upper 40’s. Mostly sunny Wednesday with highs in the upper 60’s and lows in the low 50’s. We will see 12 hours of daylight on September 25th, a Full Moon on the 26th and the sun will set at 7 p.m. CDT on the 28th. The normal high for September 28th is 68, and the normal low is 45. The scurs will have baked potatoes on their menu soon.

 

The Full Moon on the 26th is the Harvest Moon. Unfortunately, little harvest is likely to occur by the 26th and seeing the Full Moon is also unlikely due to the clouds. Nevertheless this moon is so named as the settlers could work longer into the night as the moon rise would also tend to be earlier During September. It also goes by several other names by some such as The Corn Moon, The Barley Moon and the Wine Moon. The Ojibwe knew this as The Rice Moon and the Sioux called it The Moon when Plums are Scarlet. At the ranch it is The Vine Crop Moon as squash, pumpkins, gourds and late muskmelon are harvested when we don’t get stuck anyway. 

 

What a disaster the weekend turned out to be. Rainfall starting on Friday night, the heaviest running in a narrow band down MN Hwy. 30. It tapered off rather quickly within a few miles either side of the road. The rain didn’t stop until around 1 a.m. Saturday morning. I had little way of knowing just how heavy it had rained other than by watching the radar and guessing about where it was the heaviest. At the ranch, the MN Climatology Dept. gauge measured 4.57”. In Ellendale on the CoCoRaHS network, 7.29” was tallied. In New Richland, the MN Climatology Dept. gauge reading was 7.51”. There were reports of up to 9” west of town. 

 

Dumping that much water into a watershed in such a short period of time was indeed a recipe for disaster, especially after a wet start to September. This is the third one of these events in recent history. The odd thing is the 2010, 2016 and now this 2026 event all occurred within a few calendar dates of each other. September  23rd and 24th, the 22nd and 23rd, and now the 18th and 19th respectively. The good news was in 2010, October precip was well below normal. It was near normal in 2016. With the extensive tile systems in place, some warmer temps and lower precip, it can turn around quickly. NOAA is predicting better than even odds of above normal temps and even odds of above or below normal precip. Farmers shouldn’t get their daubers down just yet.   

 

We were lucky at the ranch with only some water seepage into the basement. Living on a hill has its perks. The dehumidifier likely needs to be replaced as it fails to remove as much water as it once did. The yard slopes away but it’s still too wet to do much without tearing it up. The garden is also extremely muddy even though it’s positioned on a sidehill. With Mrs. Cheviot gone and very little sunshine, slogging through the mud makes doing chores less pleasant. Not much drying occurs between rains. I had visions of barn cleaning early this fall, but that horse has left the barn. It’s too wet to stockpile for now so will just have to be patient I guess. Maybe vent my frustrations on the boxelder that fell in the lot a while back, if I can get the chainsaw started that is.

 

One could see recently that we are truly moving into fall mode. I noticed some of the solar lights were having a difficult time recharging a few weeks back. I noticed the same thing with the solar lights lighting the path to the lake recently in Canada. The combination of a lower sun angle, shorter daylength, cooler temps, cloudy skies and the leaves still on the trees apparently were all factors having an impact, especially on our solar lights here at home. When I moved a couple of them out into the open they responded by lighting up again at dusk and staying lit much longer into the night. That was an early sign that conditions were not heading in the right direction to dry things up once it started getting wet. That won’t change for a while either.

 

Poppy really didn’t care for the storm either. She was restless when it was potty time due to all the thunder and lightning. Luckily, other things have occupied her time since. I picked a large Crenshaw melon from the garden and put it on the porch. There was a copious amount of growling that took me a while to figure out. That melon was not there the last time she’d looked out the window, and she let me know about it. Early Tuesday morning, she had a barking fit. I rolled over and went back to sleep once it subsided. When I went out to do chores the sheep were still in the barn. I looked out in the windbreak and saw what appeared to be more sheep. Wrong. Deer, several of them. They’d likely been eating apples off the trees prior to that. Good to know the storm hadn’t affected the Corgi alarm system.

 

See you next week…real good then.