We had a long cool, wet May. It's often been a struggle for the farmers to get field work done in between rainstorms. But the strawberries love this kind of weather; they grow lush and the berries develop good size and flavor when they develop slowly in cooler temperatures. The first berries were picked today while I was at work. Some of the berries that were picked will go up the freeway to Twin Cities Local Food for drop off at 6 locations in the Twin Cities. The rest are going to the Burnsville Farmers' Market.
As chance would have it, rain is expected for tomorrow and the next day. Originally the weather service was predicting torrential rains, with amounts as much as 5-6 inches over 2 days. The numbers have since been scaled back to amounts from 2-4 inches and I'm pretty happy about that. For 5 years now, we've had water seep into our basement whenever we have more than 3 inches of rain in a week. So tonight when I got home from work, the first order of business was cleaning the gutters and clearing all the downspouts in (possibly vain) hopes of avoiding having to vacuum up water in the basement. We've ascertained that the water comes from the raised water table during unusually high rainfall periods. There's no water damage on the walls so it's not running down the foundation and coming in through cracks in the walls. It's coming in where the foundation walls meet the floor. We're working through a series of possible fixes, starting with the least intrusive and least expensive.
This spring I paid the farm crew to pull out all the foundation plantings, pull up the landscape fabric and the rock the previous owner had put down. I've hated that rock from the beginning, so I'm not unhappy to lose it - and many of the plantings had reached the end of their lives, so that's not a huge loss either. It looks pretty rough right now, though. A landscaper has been contracted to come and grade the dirt around the foundation - a huge pile of black dirt is sitting outside the house waiting for enough dry days in a row to do the job. Once that's done, the plan is to cover it with natural mulch, keep those gutters clear, and see whether that solves our problem. If not, we'll have to look at some other kind of drainage project.
I'm in favor of keeping the water out of the house by putting French drains or something similar outside the house. It's expensive because it requires excavating to the foundation base to lay drain tile. The other option is to catch the water when it comes into the house, by putting a drain system around the perimeter of the house inside. That seems harder and more expensive since the basement walls are finished. And it just seems wrong to deal with the water once it's already inside. We'll see. It's definitely a problem we have to solve over the next couple of years. Spending days vacuuming up water and then 2-3 weeks dealing with mold and insect hatchings isn't much fun - I'd much rather do almost anything else.
So strawberry season begins with a few rainy days, but the extended forecast is for cool daytime and overnight temperatures, which is great. Our live-in help arrives this weekend, so it behooves me to try to bring some order to the house by then. If I'm not vacuuming up water in the basement, I'll probably be able to do that. Right now it behooves me to take a quick shower (cleaning gutters is dirty work), and try to get some sleep since I'll be up about 6:00 a.m. to take those berries north.
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