In Some Respects, Soggy Vermont Is A GOOD Thing

 Gawd, it's a swamp out there!  

My St. Albans, Vermont gardens remain soggy as heck after
a week of rain. This might actually be a good thing, though.

My yard in St. Albans, Vermont is on a slope and usually drains fairly well. But it's just a mushy mess of water and mud right now. And snow, at least for awhile this morning. 

Some areas of Vermont, including here in St. Albans, were experiencing heavy snow showers this morning.  It was localized, as I measured 0.7 inches of new snow while just a few miles down the road there was nothing. But the snow added even more water to the mucky mess.

Yesterday's rain just ran off because the ground couldn't hold any more. The trickle of water by my house that we sarcastically call the Woof River was at its highest level in two years.  It actually was a brook at least, for a change. 

I'm sure it's just as soggy pretty much everywhere in Vermont.  Mud season was and is bad, no, gawd awful. Plus, mud season has been extended by this week's rain. In just three days ending yesterday, Burlington got two-thirds of its normal installment for the full month of April.

We're lucky there's no big-ass two or three inch rainstorms in the forecast this week. Pretty much any new rain would flow into rivers and streams, and that amount of rain would surely set off some significant flooding. 

Nothing of the sort is in the forecast. It will rain again a few times this week, but there's no sign of anything torrential.  

As horrible as the muddy roads have been, and as much as people want their sopping wet yards to dry out so we can primp for spring, this wetness overall is actually good news.

Stay with me, here. 

To add insult to injury, heavy snow showers blew through
St. Albans this morning. 

The last two springs in Vermont were dry.  That left us with some trouble with drought for most of the summers of 2020 and 2021 especially in northern parts of the state.  The droughts never got super severe, but there was worries about the trend, especially when it came to ground water and wells. The U.S. Drought Monitor is still listing Vermont's Northeast Kingdom as "abnormally dry" due to the lingering effects of last year's dryness.

Believe it not, here's another reason we want the rest of this spring to  have more light rain, fog, drizzle and mist than usual. 

Last year, gypsy moth caterpillars really wrecked huge swaths of Vermont forests, defoliating many hundreds or even thousands of acres.  A fungus called Entomophaga maimaiga really trashes the gypsy moth caterpillars, but you need wet weather for the fungus to thrive. Drought conditions last year saved the caterpillars from the fungus.

If it's a damp spring this year, the fungus might make a nice comeback and squelch those damn caterpillars.

You never know if this rainier trend will continue or the water will shut off, plunging us into drought conditions again.

Current forecasts seem to indicate frequent but light bouts of rain, which would be kind of a Goldilocks situation. That would keep things wet, but we wouldn't have to deal with flooding issues. 

As we move toward late spring and summer, precipitation increasingly takes the form of torrential showers and thunderstorms. If the ground is super wet and there's far too  many of those storms, we would run into flash flood troubles like we did in 2011 and 2013,  But if it's just typical last spring and summer scattered thunderstorms, then we're fine.