Over the past two weeks, we have had a a lot of rain here in Sydney. It has now got to the point where the ground is completely saturated and cannot hold much, if any, more.

At work, the lawns I care for in the rose garden cannot be mowed due to the fact that the ride on mower would sink into the ground and make a mess! While the roses themselves are happy that there is plenty of water about, there is some form of mould forming on some spent flowers it has been that wet-these were promptly removed!

Elsewhere around the school that I work at, there are endless numbers of dead leaves getting washed everywhere. As it is now autumn, the deciduous trees are happily making a mess on the pavements and roads. Where we have to clean up, the leaves are so much heavier due to being wet. This makes cleaning up more of a chore than normal!

When it is raining heavily, we can’t actually do any work. Getting and then staying wet is often asking people to get sick, so in heavy rain we stay as dry as possible. We also only use power tools that are electric, which is also not good in the rain. While there is work we can do without the power tools, there is only so much water you can take before it’s an issue!

This leads on to a fair bit of boredom if the rain doesn’t stop. Yes, I have reports to write, tools can be cleaned and stuff like that, but there is only so much of that you can do before it is done and there is no point starting again on clean tools.

When the rain stops and the sun comes out, plants can go crazy with growth, including weeds. This means that everyone expects that you can just as quickly get the mowing done and the weeds dealt with in a matter of seconds it seems! It doesn’t work like that when you have persistent rain. The soil takes time to dry enough to get a mower on, especially when grass is long-you end up on repeat telling people why you can’t do it without making it look worse for a couple more days!

At home, the rain is good because it means I don’t have to do as much watering! When there is as much rain as we have had this week, around 60mm, I can’t fertilise my veg crops. This is because I use a liquid feed which will just get washed out my pots and down the drain. This is never a good thing!

The coir pots I use for sowing seeds break down over time and this gets quicker in the rain-my seedlings need more time before being potted up, so the disintegrating posts could become another problem!