Be Careful What You Ask For

For the last few months we've been experiencing what I'm told is a pretty typical dry spell in Florida.  We noticed it because the pools (we have one at the rental to deal with as well as the new house) have been loosing so much water to evaporation that we've had to drag out the hose to fill them back up.  We've also been out regularly watering our orange trees.  Needless to say, we've been praying for rainy season to come so we could stop all the extra water consumption.  Maybe we should have been a bit more specific in our prayers...

We were living in our camper in Florida this time last year and we got to experience a leak into the camper and some flooded roads at the campground but we figured that was just a case of maintenance (on the camper and the campground).  A couple days ago we discovered what it's really like to experience the rainy season in Florida. 

Florida rainy season can be brutal!  I was not prepared to do any measuring so I'm not exactly sure how much rain we got, but based on the increased water in our pool I would say it's a good guess that we got 4" in about an hour.  We ended up with a total of about 5" before it was all said and done. 

The lady we bought our house from mentioned that the water had a tendency to run down the driveway toward the detached garage, but we weren't expecting THIS much.

Just to the side of the garage.  You can see the water flowing around the building.

We also found that the water pooled in the back yard,

parts of the front yard,

and made a river of our entire driveway including the carport.

Driveway after the rain

The house is also lacking gutters so we ended up with sheets of water flowing off the edges of the house.

Looking out to screened in pool

A couple days before the rain, I noticed that our banana plants seemed to be a little water logged.  Now we know why.

Base of banana plants

So now we are coming up with a plan of attack to help with all of this.  We want to get gutters (which we will use to collect rain water from for dryer times), we need to do something about the driveway, and we need to do something about the pooling water in the area where we were planning on putting our garden.  Afterall, we don't want our seeds floating away when it rains.

Proposed garden area.

All I know is that rain is a good thing, but there is a limit.