Rainy Season

This is my broccoli bed on March 7. I'll take more pics of it next week, after I see if the plants can survive the deluge.
I looked at my garden journal for last year, and in the 9 days leading up to April 6, we got over a foot of rain. This year, we've had about 4 inches of rain so far in the last 4 days, according to the National Weather Service. I looked out my window yesterday to a scary sight- it looked like I was trying to grow broccoli in a rice paddy! The clay subsoil was turning our backyard into a pond. The flower beds are slightly raised and the brick walls have drainage holes, so they were OK, but the middle bed was not. I remembered a tiny trench I dug last year leading away from the bed, choked with leaves. I re-dug the parts filled in by the fall bed-dig and dug the leaves out of the other part. The yard has a gentle southerly slope toward a small sidewalk that funnels water to a neighbor's driveway. By later in the day the soil was sodden, but water was no longer pooled around the plants. The driveways in our neighborhood are all shaped to catch runoff from the yards and funnel it to the city drains. It is a neat system, as long as we do not get many inches of rain in a short period. Then it backfires and we get street flooding from the excess runoff. I'm thinking some household cisterns and catchment ponds might help. If each of us had a cistern holding a few thousand gallons of runoff water (maybe where a septic system would be if we did not have city sewer) for watering grass or gardens in the dry season, and if there were catchment ponds on the public lands and in common areas of residential developments (many here do have these, because the outlying areas of Memphis, where the growth is, are often on low-lying ground), maybe the flash flooding (it is here and gone in a few hours) wouldn't be so bad. 

I need to get out there and work. My borage and nasturtium plants really need to go in the ground. I may just transplant them to individual containers, and try for next weekend (planned to be the Big Planting Week-end), because the ground is just too wet. We got more rain last night, and even more is forecast for Monday night, Tuesday, and Thursday. Spring!