The other day I mentioned that we built our raised garden beds to counteract the periodic flooding we experience.
Well, here is a good example!
This water will sit here for about a week, slowly dissipating (if it stops raining, that is!). If we had put our vegetables directly into the ground, here, we would have soggy dead plants inside of lovely fresh veg. Raising up the garden bed allows the water to drain away, but also stops the long vegetable roots from becoming waterlogged when the rest of the ground is a bog.
The concrete garden edge was apparently installed as a “spreader” to collect the rainwater run-off from our very long, steep, driveway. It stops the water from pouring over the edge of the rocks into the bush in just one place. If that were allowed to happen, we would get erosion at the low point, and the water would cut away at the rock, and flow too fast over the edge.
And so, periodically, there are ponds in our lawn.
At the top of the lawn there is an overflow grate from the driveway drainage pipe. It allows excess water to wash out over the lawn. Underneath our lawn there is a large reservoir (not a water collection tank, although that would have been cool!). The reservoir has filled up and the overflow is doing its job.
Inside the chicken coop, where we don’t have grass to stabilise the ground, things are looking pretty slushy. Poor chooks – there are ponds inside the coop!
So I’ve temporarily moved their grain dispenser and put their morning scraps outside, to give them a chance to scratch at the ground, rather than just wallow like a pig!
At least, until that darn brush turkey comes along, drat him. *shakes fist*
Simple Crafty Life 
Our poor chookies are also wallowing in mud. A few weeks ago we were anxiously watching every cloud in the sky, looking for rain. Now we are madly looking for patches of blue. At least we can hear croaking from the creek again! Sydney definately has had her face washed.
This was very much our experience over the last couple of months, too! I said in the article that the water would take a week to soak in — which has been true in the past — but it had all disappeared by this afternoon, unbelievably. The trees must be madly siphoning up the water out of the ground!
We have quite a few dead looking she-oaks and dead coppiced limbs on the peppermint gum … so frustrating to have the weather all at once instead of sensibly spread out! I hope your chooks get some relief from the mud over the weekend. 🙂