We've been having a dry fall, not what I, accustomed to the usual wet and chilly Mediterranean autumn, expect, though the seasons have certainly gotten irregular. Around the start of December the skies turned heavy gray, the temperature dropped, and it began to snow: a day and a half later we had gotten around ten inches, the biggest fall in recent years, I think. It used to snow a good deal here, but not lately. Then the rain came, accompanied by chill, fog, slush, some snow, and wind now and then. We just went out to measure the height of the water in a bucket that's been out the whole time: about eight inches has fallen since the start of the month. I know that, to Americans, that doesn't sound like that much, but it's about one-fifth of our average annual rainfall. It's no longer droughty.

Partly because of the snow, partly because the rain has fallen over a period of several days, it will help recharge the aquifers, which everybody depends on during periods of drought, especially during the generally dry summers. I've been watching the level of my neighbors' pond fall lower and lower this fall, but it should fill now. You can hear the streams roaring at night. This morning for once it wasn't raining, so I went out for my second excursion around the garden since the weather began. A fair amount of breakage, which isn't tragic, and the Italian cypresses are a mess. That's not a problem: I'll shear and prune them back into their proper outline, and they'll fill in again soon enough, as they grow fast. Meanwhile I have lots of organic matter for the garden. Cleanup, along with regular pruning and weeding, is going to keep me busy all winter, though.

My delta project is coming along. This is area at the bottom of our property in the big garden where the first of two drainage ditches exits from our land. I used to keep the ditch clean, and water-borne sediment passed down to the property below, where it dropped out of the current (no ditch there) and created a beautiful light soil ideal for nettles and blackberries. So I decided to begin blocking the ditch on our land and capture that sediment for our garden. It has been slowly filling, and now with the recent rains a noteworthy amount of sediment has been deposited. We still need more. My chief worry is what the old roses growing in the area, a couple of which now have their roots under water, think about this. However, several years back we had an extremely wet winter which flooded parts of the shade garden for weeks, and the roses there did fine. I think that if the roses are deciduous, so largely dormant this time of year, and if the water is flowing, not stagnant, it's likely to be all right. We got a lot of sediment from that shade garden flooding, too; in fact, after a while we began making channels to guide the sediment-laden water where we wanted it to go.

The forecast is for partly cloudy Sunday and Monday. I'm looking forward to it, as over the last ten days I can recall perhaps two hours of sort-of sunny weather. It's been surprisingly cheerful, though. But I need exercise.