A truck of muck

After a pretty dry start to Spring in St. Louis, the rain has started coming more regularly. Thursday and Friday we had strong, gusty winds all day long, then Friday night a line of scary, severe storms came through the area -- as they did across most of the central part of the country. The worst parts of the storms missed our neighborhood but we did get a large amount of rain. This morning started out fresh and sunny though.

I'll be doing a lot more weeding today, but there is something more pressing that I need to do.

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Before I hunker down to that soon-to-be-revealed task, Super-whitey is quite happy to be able to get out of the garage and into the sunlight for a little while:

Most of the young bamboo culms stood up fine to the winds and heavy rains, although right now they're bent under the weight of countless water drops:

Ok, enough procrastinating. Time to get to work! Since my truck has been parked facing downhill on the street for the last 6 months, I often find the truck bed holding water after a storm. Usually this water pours out when I drive uphill. Usually, but not lately. A couple of weeks ago when I dug bamboo at Michael's the first time, I got a load of compost. Some of that compost was left in the truck bed, and apparently it was enough to plug all the cracks and keep the water in the bed.

So I've been driving around with a big load of "compost tea" in the back.

Even when I moved some of the compost with a trowel, I only got a trickle of water out the back:

So slowly open the tailgate and let the waters flow!

Although the plants really don't need more water, they'll appreciate the nutrient-rich "tea".

Then shovel out the sopping-wet compost and use it around my 'onondaga' Viburnum (which you can see in the background):

After hosing out the truck bed, all that's left is an extensive flow pattern on the driveway that resembles a river delta in miniature:

Very cool!

Now that the truck is all cleaned out, I'll probably need to go get another load of compost -- the reason I didn't clean the truck bed out before. That's how it usually goes, doesn't it?