It has been a soggy day in Wales, with rain only just showing signs of slowing down at 4pm. Heavy rain, like we experienced today, always seems to put a downer on things. I don’t mind rain, but when it is so persistent and lasts the whole day it really isn't much fun. This post is about the huge volume of water and how we deal with it.
Rain is nothing fancy for Wales, but it is rarely this heavy. We are so accustomed in the UK to rain that we actually have dozens of phrases describing types of rain such as; it’s raining stair-rods…don’t ask.
After being inside for most of the day not being up to anything significantly useful I decided to put on my waterproofs and go out with my GoPro to assess the water situation outside. I learnt a lot from this experience such as my waterproof trousers aren’t actually waterproof. But one thing that was useful was that I could clearly see surface water direction. If you are designing a garden or farm then one thing you must do is go to the highest point on a rainy day and observe the path that water takes whilst going downhill. For many people, water conservation is a necessity, but in Wales we do take it for granted.
After 5 minutes of walking around I knew that this was a serious amount of water we were dealing with. Both of our streams had multiple overflowing points. I have never seen anything quite like it and neither had my dad. The track heading past our house was a thriving stream, and some had begun coming into our garden so I had to get a spade and build a couple of barriers to divert the water away.
I then went to the duck pond (pictured below) and the raging water was pushing against the electric fence and had caught many sticks, I don't want to move the fence because it is quite frankly a pain to do, so I removed some of the sticks and I am now hoping that it will be okay. And no the electric fence isn't turned on, that wouldn't be a very clever thing to do.
I then went up into the woods which gave me the biggest surprise of the day. The stream itself had multiplied into 3 streams due to a backlog of water which couldn't get past the tree (on the left in the image below) as normal. There was something that I really liked about seeing water like this. Perhaps it is because I have never seen it there before. In fact in the second image below I used to built small drainage trenches when I was younger because I wanted to go into some kind of construction. If only I would have created those drainage trenches sooner. 
Seeing such a volume of water makes me wish we had some kind of hydro-power system to harness all of the energy in the water, but it would be short lived as usually our stream doesn't have enough water volume or slope gradient to make it worthwhile.
Our track is unfortunately quite vulnerable to heavy rain like today. Because of the small stones a lot of it often washes down; blocking our culverts and carving gullies - so we have to keep on top of this by clearing out any potential blockages because the purpose is to get the water of the track as soon as we possibly can. The next two images are a before and after by our bottom gate. You can see that clearing the water channel meant that it now diverted a lot of that water back into the stream. Also note that the volume of water coming down the track has been reduced due to clearing, diverting and unblocking further up our track.
I do apologise for the blurriness but it was raining so hard that I couldn't keep the rain off the GoPro case. I think the images above show that a little bit of work can make all the difference. Our winter weather isn't always that bad, here is an image of our homestead in snow just before Christmas:
All-in-all I spent about an hour battling the elements and I actually really enjoyed being outside with the rain pelting down.I felt fresh and awake, the opposite to how I felt earlier on in the day stuck indoors. Maybe rain isn't so bad after all?
That is a particularly wet looking patch of land!! We've had rain today and snow yesterday. The hills were white but towns were fine.
Don't think we've had any localised flooding however the water table is very saturated. I took our dog for a walk yesterday and the river was swollen.
Missed an opportunity to go looking for otters though, there was none lower down the river and last time it was as the upper river flooded I saw one making its way down stream!
Hope when the rain stops the damage isnt too bad.
We have had an extreme amount on already saturated land. Roads have been closed to floods, some people are saying it is the worst localised flooding they have experienced. Oh wow otters are really cool. We occasionally even get one venturing up our little streams.
The purpose of permaculture as described in its' principles is to store and capture energy, not to run it off of your homestead... Sorry if it feels like I'm bashing you but I'm sure that your nursery trees would be happy to have another swale :) Thanks for these photos and your story of life in Wales- here in Texas it snowed three times this winter - which is also quite bizarre! @lonestarpoet
@lonestarpoet Yes we do store and capture water, but to be honest we get too much of it. There is no point making Swales because the ground has enough water anyway, and they could be washed away over time. So instead we try and channel a lot of the water away because we get around 2m of rainfall a year:)
Dear @huwsnursery. In case you do have to much water and need to divert it, it is reasonable to invest in a one in a lifetime solution by sopling your diversion drains very gently at 1:300 to1:500 and zig-ziging them through your plot with level sill spillways on the direction changes, so that you don't have soil loss through erosion and having to repair them after every bigger rainfall.
What @my-permaculture is describing is what I think would be most wise, but that's just my 2 steems :)
Thanks for sharing your pictures ! I wanna visit lol.
Flooding is fun to watch as long as it's not destroying anything too important, haha.
Fortunately it doesn't look like anything has been seriously damaged :)
We've been gasping for rain here! Luckily for the garden, as we're on water restrictions, I woke to some rain. yay
Love the angle of the first photo ^.
I guess you don't really get a feel for the property until you've experienced it at its worst.
I am glad you have had a bit at least, you're welcome to pop over and take away some of our rain haha! No that is very true
Yes, please. Just pop a few buckets out and I'll be up to collect them shortly lolol. ;)
Impressive amount of water there Huw.
It hasn't been so bad for us here and we are only a few miles away.
I believe in some places in the area like Talsarn there has been massive flooding.
There certainly was! Yes Talsarn has become quite the icon on national news about the weather today!
Wow, I haven't seen the news today. I didn't know Talsarn had made it on to the news.
I saw the video that JL had taken.
Good to see a young person like myself on STEEMIT and battling the same elements as me here in Canada. LOL Now following you
Ash thank you! I've given you a follow back and look forward to your content :)
Thats a whole lot of rain! Are you building earthworks this year to capture it next year?
No we have to much rain to capture, I'd much rather invest my energy and time into building healthier soil and perhaps adapting our orchard into a forest garden.