Is it possible for a free standing rain gauge in the middle of open space to be wrong? I wonder sometimes. I'm in Selma on the Clayton side-west of the magic I-95 divide and I have had 4.25 inches by my gauge. 1.5 at 7am yesterday. It just seems odd to me to have such a difference from new2carolina while being so close. I don't know about y'all but I'm enjoyng the reprieve of this rain. I can spend time here w/o feeling guilty. This time of year I start getting stressed out about my pot ghetto and running out of time to deal with it. Shari

Mick, I'm glad the hail missed you too. Whenever I have a garden that looks darn-near perfect and has plants that are producing like crazy, that is usually when the hail hits. Hail never hits us here in a bad year (like last year) when everything looks pitiful and isn't doing so well. So, since the garden looks spectacular right now, I've been expecting baseball-sized hail. Our rainfall was slightly below normal for the year-to-date, but today's couple of inches really boosted our total for the year so far to about 13" or 14". For us, a good year is about 30" to 32", so 14" by this point in time isn't bad. The rain has been falling in small amounts like 0.02 one day and 0.37 another and 0.23 another, so getting 2.6 was wonderful. Having the temperatures about 15 degrees lower than yesterday was nice too. I'm expecting the plants to have another good growth spurt now that they finally got some water. We're supposed to get more rain tonight, but I'm not counting on it. We WERE NOT supposed to have rain this morning, so I figure we'll make up for it by not getting the rain forecast to fall tonight. Dawn

And a month later, I'm back with an update and questions. :) Finally located most of my needed plants a couple of weeks ago, and then it took almost 2 weeks to do all the digging. Here is my husband working on the digging, with some help from my cat, lol: Here it is leveled and ready for planting: The inlet freshly installed, but not yet buried: And here it is mostly planted, with some empty spaces left for the plants I have yet to acquire (and the edging for that top portion): Which brings me to my questions. :) 1. If you look closely, you can see at the bottom of the most recent photo the edge of the concrete walk. The berm pretty much starts right at the walk, which I did not plan but it seemed like it needed to happen that way because that edge of the garden is about 3 inches lower than the top edge. (Top of the photo.) I felt like it needed that extra reinforcement, instead of leaving the 6" flat at the edge. You can see the blue eyed grass I have planted there, BUT...I think I need more? It seems like if it rained really hard right now the edge of the berm would start to erode away. 2. Take a look at this photo, I tried to take it so you could closely see the inside of the berm: (I just noticed the photobombing golfball in there, lol...I don't even know, lol) So the depth of the berm is about 8-9". I'm worried that the whole thing is going to erode *down into the bottom* even with the mulch on it. So my question is this: Can I mulch this with leaves instead of something more chunky, like woodchips? I'm thinking the leaves, if I water them down after placing them, will hold things in place better. Should I plant more in the sides of the berm? Thoughts? Thank for any and all ideas. :)

Have you researched the moisture tolerance of all these plants? For instance, I don’t know of any Penstemon that likes it really wet, though many are fine with ordinary garden moisture and a lot like it fairly dry. You haven’t mentioned the species or cultivar you plan to plant. Several of these are thuggish in garden settings. Monarda/bee balm/bergamot, sensitive fern, and Canada anemone will all spread enthusiastically, overrunning and outcompeting less vigorous plants. Do you have a way to prevent spreading into the neighbor’s yard such as a buried root barrier? I am not sure what you mean by yellow coneflower since there is more than one plant that is given that common name. Do you know the genus and species? Do you want any winter interest in this spot? If so, research shrubs that do well in your area in wet spots. For instance, around here, small cultivars of winterberry holly/Ilex verticillata (need a male as well as female) will have bright red berries through the fall and into winter until eaten by birds, red-twigged dogwood has red winter stems and some have attractive berries or nice fall color, or some of the smaller cultivars of Thuja occidentalis get used in damp spots. Other small shrubs if you want more structure might include smaller cultivars of Itea virginica/sweetspire or Clethra alnifolia/summersweet, both of which have summer flowers and nice fall color and are quite tolerant of a range of moisture, including quite wet.