We'll take 15 millimetres

We got 15 millimetres of rain today, the first reasonable rain we’ve had since May. Fifteen millimetres isn’t a lot. We’ll take it.

The first 5 millimetres mostly disappeared. The ground was so dry that afterwards there was almost no water sitting in the contours.

Then Anthony had to go down and feed Hope, our bottle lamb. There was a big storm coming, so it was a dash to get there before it arrived. Naturally, the rain started properly halfway through, and Anthony ended up standing under the sheep shelter with the mob, waiting for it to pass.

That storm dropped another 10 millimetres fairly quickly. When it eased off, the farm looked different: most of the contours had filled with water.

They’re working.

We’ve spent a fair bit of time digging shallow trenches across the slope and piling the soil into berms on the downhill side. The idea is simple: when water starts moving downhill, catch it, spread it out and give it more time to soak into the ground instead of letting it leave the farm.

We’ve run bore water through one of them a few times just to see where the water went, so we knew the shape was doing what we expected. Rain is a different test.

The first bit seems to have gone straight into wetting everything up. Once that had happened, the harder fall started moving across the surface — and that’s when the contours came alive.

We’ve recently planted mulberry and pigeon pea just below one of those berms. Part of the experiment is to see whether slowing water across the slope can make that strip a better place to grow through the dry parts of the year.

One rain event doesn’t prove much. But tonight there is water sitting across the hill where, without those contours, much of it would have kept heading downhill. After the last few months, that’s pretty exciting.

And we’ll definitely take the 15 millimetres.