Monday, March 31, 2025

This is the eleventh installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Happy Monday, everyone, unless of course it's not Monday for you, in which case how is the future? What do we have in store for us? I can tell you what's in store here, and that's rain. Lots of rain. For those who don't know, my family and I used to live in Idaho, for nearly all of our lives. Now we live in Indiana, and one of the biggest differences between the two is the amount of rain. Data-wise, the average monthly rainfall for Boise was just barely an inch, while the monthly rainfall for the county we're in now is nearly four inches. Practically speaking that seems totally accurate. It hardly ever rained in southern Idaho, so we relied entirely on sprinklers to water our lawn and a drip irrigation system that I installed from that sprinkler system to water our backyard garden.

What I didn't realize at first was that the irrigation water came in from the commercial farms nearby, and had lots of seeds and other debris floating along in it. There was a filter attached to the main line coming in, but it was so coarse that it only really caught rocks and other big things, the rest being able to pass through the sprinklers safely. When we installed the drip lines, they needed a much finer mesh, so I had to special order a different filter. Problem was, that one got completely mucked up every single day, and I had to go wash it out. Most people install drip irrigation from their regular garden hose, but we had to pay for that water, while the irrigation water was free. So, I spent every morning cleaning filters. But it was totally worth it, especially the morning I found a frog in the sprinkler box and woke up the kids early to go release it in a little pond in a nearby subdivision.

How did it get in there in the first place? We may never know. What I do know is that we'll have more tomorrow.

How much does it rain where you are?