Flood update - We have plants!

I was out at the garden better able to assess the issues and found my humor has returned.  The plants did some relocating which is amusing me to death.

Here is the Chives ready to bloom now making bedding friends with lambs ear.  The lambs ear is an edging plant I use mostly to mark the edge of the garden.  Then have moved inland....

They are easy to relocate so I will dig them and divide them and put them back where they came from.

There are a few lamb's ear in the Lady's mantle too!  I relocated these plants from my backyard garden when I moved.  I love the way dew catches on the leaves in the morning.  It is more an ornamental than an herb I use in my business, but it does have a few medicinal properties so I keep it around for personal use.

The surprize of the day was the  Ivy in the Wormwood.  I do not have any ivy in my herb garden, so I do not know where this came from.  It was very shallowly rooted, so I removed it and took it back to the apartment to use in a hanging basket.



wormwood (ivy at the top)



I trimmed the rue back last fall because it was hit hard by the drought, but it looks to be coming back strong and hearty now doesn't it!

The sage is doing well, but I think the leaves are a bit deformed, they look rather wrinkly to me.  None of the tender perennial sage, like Purple Sage or Tri-color Sage lived.  Although that may have been the drought or the winter rather than the flood.

The thyme has a lot of debris in it and has bare spots, but I am slowly raking it out. 

I will take two cuttings from the plants before I harvest any of these for use in the business just to make sure any flooded leaves are removed and I am harvesting only new growth to make into herb blends.  One can never be too careful with flooded plants.

The sweet woodruff was blooming which told me everything would be okay.  I did not plant this in the herb garden, it moved in here all on its own from one of the neighbors.  I let it stay because we used to have this growing under the pines at our house and it always reminds me of my first herb garden!

Things will soon be back to normal and I will have to decide how much soil do I want to truck in here in my little Nissan Versa to replace what was lost, or do I work with the plants in thier relocated positions..... Time will tell.

After the flood - the herb garden

We have had several warm and sunny days so I finally dragged myself out to the garden patch to see what it looked like now that the flood waters have receeded.

In some places there is just a lot of dirt and mud deposited that makes the plants in the hills and rows look non existent   There are plants there, they are just the same color as the dirt so you can't see them in the photo.  I was going for the ghost plant look but the photos do not do it justice.

In other places there is the deposit of what looks like straw but is actually grasses, probably river grasses.  I went through with the rake and pulled it away from the plants, but I have not raked it all out yet.  These are the ornamental flowers or moth repellent herbs: yarrow, wormwood, artemesia.  It was soothingly fragrant to do this raking.

I raked out a few of the drier areas careful to leave anything green, but I swear these look like sweet peas which I have never grown in this garden so I'm not sure what is going on in this corner.  This is where the annuals grow and normally by now I have cilantro and dill volunteers from last year that are popping up.  I think they were all washed away.

This is what I mean by that river grass.  It is like a thatch that is caught in all the fencing and any place where it would be snagged while flowing through with the swift moving water; like this staked area I have around the tarragon.  Tarragon comes back from the root and there were a few small soldiers popping out of the ground once I cut the string and pulled away the thatch.

From a distance everything looks like grass, but you can see the rows and the path and the plant s turning deeper green, so the restoration is beginning.  I think most of my hills were leveled, shortened and in some cases washed out.

Raised Beds
I use a style of raised bed that does not need walled sides.  I created it by digging out dirt in long rows and piling the dirt up.  Then I plant the plants in the tops of the rows of hills.  It makes weeding easier and you can add more soil and compost toppings while targeting the actual plants rather than treating, watering or fertilizing the spaces between the plants.  It is also a great way to conserve water.  In some cases I covered the hills with wood chip mulch to preserve the moisture.  That mulch is all gone now.  I am sure someone else is raking it out of their garden.

It is still too soon to tell how many of the perennials have been lost.  The sage looked so sickly that I did not take a photo so it could preserve its modesty, but there were two new green leaves on the very ends of the upright stems so I think it will come back.  The thyme beds were thick with mud and debris and I worked on them first.  I was impressed that these low growers seemed to be less damaged.  I guess the water just flowed over them rather than depositing debris in their stems.

Here are my littlest thyme plants all safe and sound.  The big ones need a washing, they are suffereing from mud.

It rained... There was flooding!

As many may know heavy rain hit northern Illinois last week.  Although I can say that I did not suffer any damage or loss at my home (I still live in an apartment on the third floor!) my gardens were not so lucky.

This is the DuPage River, west branch overflowing near my garden.  The first pangs of panic struck when I saw this on my drive over!

I could get up the back entrance to the garden space, but I could not actually get to the garden.  Of my 3/4 of an acre about two-thirds were covered with water.

This is a view from the edge of the garden back toward the road.

The garden rows are underwater and the berm by the road that keeps out the winter salt may be keeping the water in...

It think I have shown the fence before, that is it in the foreground, beyond the fence is the worst part of the garden where you cannot even see that there are rows of plants planted in there.  After taking this photo I left.

My heart was heavy.  I have had this rented land since before I moved into the apartment and we have lived there for 12 years now. I moved all of my personal plants here when we moved so that I could return them to a garden when we finally decide on a house. It gets wet and soggy sometimes in this space and one cannot always go there in April because  it is muddy and I want to avoid compacting the soil, but it has never been like this.

I was at the Garden Clubs of Illinois Convention over the weekend so I have not yet been back to see if the water has receded, but I expect much of it has.  I decided to allow my obligations from keep me from returning and getting upset.  If the plants do not get air they will die as they did not have much growth to sustain them because of our unseasonably cold Spring.

I am lecturing tomorrow night, so I will not have many follow up photos to post, but I will share an update when I have one.  For now I think I have a few pre-programmed posts which will pop up and I will take a few photos at my program tomorrow, but I do not have much else to share as my excitement for Spring is a bit impaired.

I would like to say that I am thankful that I do not have this garden issue and a home issue like so many others around my area do, so I will be grateful about that!