After All the Rain...

We feel very blessed to have not gotten the amount of rain our neighbors to the west experienced that was associated with Hurricane Harvey.  The destruction and flooding in Southeast Texas is overwhelming and our prayers are with the poor people that had their lives turned upside down by this terrible storm.

Over the six day period that bands of storms came through our area, I measured 10.6 inches of rainfall in the rain gauge.  Spread out over that period of time, the water easily drained and did not become a problem.  The real problem for us came 48 hours after the storm blew through.  Then the mosquito eggs laid in the standing water turned to larvae, matured and then flew in clouds to search for blood.

The "maringouin" or mosquitoes in French are terrible around here right now.  Just walking outside and they swarm around your head, light on your neck, arms and legs and have a feast.  Part of our property taxes go toward paying our Parish Mosquito Control to try to keep the mosquito population down.  They do this with a mosquito fogging truck that goes down every driveway spraying pesticide. Mosquito abatement also has a plane that flies overhead spraying to try to kill mosquitoes. We heard it overhead last night and figured we would have relief this morning. Well...

Not so fast!  The mosquitoes coating the walls in the garage by my rubber boots this morning must have been immune to whatever the plane was spraying.  I swatted this monster off of my leg (and you can see the shadow of another on the far left side of the photo.  Two observations:

• #1 I think that this mosquito stole enough of my blood that I won't be able to donate blood for the next 8 weeks until my body can produce enough to replenish it. 
• #2 This mosquito was so large, I think I could have battered it and deep-fried it and had a nice meal. 

It makes it awful hard to get any work done in the yard and garden while slapping mosquitoes, so I built a big fire and began making biochar.  The smoke kept the mosquitoes at bay for a while.  Maybe tomorrow will be a better day for gardening!