"it never rains here"

...that's what i heard from my hosts when arrived. and they were right, for the first few weeks. now it's tuesday afternoon and it hasn't stop raining/storming since friday. okay, it hasn't been going non-stop, but everyday it's been on-again/off-again from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed. the worst of it all came friday night. i woke up around 2:30am and thought the roof was going to blow off our little casita. ...and 2 hours later i was still awake and it was still doing the same thing; pouring rain, high winds, thunder, and lightening. i looked out the window at one point and thought, "this must be what a hurricane is like." i've never seen anything like it. noela (new wwoofer) and i managed to keep dry. a lot of my clothes that were below a leaky window didn't. luckily the gardens and citrus trees held up fairly well. some unripened fruit was scattered on the ground and a row of tomatoes took a pretty hard hit, but we didn't lose anything in it's entirety. well, except for the new raised-beds that were last week's project. after planting beans and peas on thursday, they are now flattened and look like a river ran right through them. so all the planting will have to be done again, and the beds reworked, but that all can be done again.

other farms and houses we're quite as lucky. entire fields were flooded and crops lost. cement walls surrounding people's houses (as is done in spain) were completed knocked down by the rivers of water that flowed across the roads. the streets in the city were flooded and the sections of beach showed noticeable signs of erosion. someone told me it was the worst storm, destruction-wise, in 20 years. i'm sure clean-up will continue for weeks and maybe months.

what does this mean for working in the garden? it means our work has been extremely limited. when it rains as much as it has it's better for the plants and soil to dry a bit before working in them. we've been able to get in a hour or so of garden work each day, but then it's odd jobs inside the house that take up the rest of our time. and do go with the lack of work outside that we can do, the hosts are gone for the week, and almost all of the work on the to-do list is outside. ...and we're almost done with everything on it and it's only tuesday (they return saturday). so it's kind of weird week around here. there isn't a ton of work that needs to be done this week, but the work that does need to get done can't because of the weather.


the rasied-beds:

before

after (pic quality is lacking)

sunday is my last full day here and then monday i fly to bucharest to meet up with levi noodles kropf.