I have written about my efforts to get grass planted in the larger, further reaches of our front yard here and here. I have finally reached the point that I am watering a seeded area, although at a rate far less than recommended. Last year I prepared and seeded an area about a third the size I’m working on this year. I watered far less than recommended then, too, but we were fortunate enough to have nice, light rain showers at just the right time. The result was a good growth of grass.

Last year I divided the seeded area into thirds, and lightly watered each third several hours apart every day for several weeks. This year, with so much more area, I can’t water the entire area in one day. This is not good. Walter Reeves, a University of Georgia plant specialist and popular gardening expert in Georgia, says that Zoysia seed must be kept moist or it will die. When I water (carefully preserving our precious underground fluids), I get a small part of the planted area wet, but not wet enough to stay wet very long in our hot Georgia sun. So far during the process, we have had either not enough or too much rain.

On Thursday, it looked like we would get rain. Possibly too much, possibly just enough. Here’s what the weather radar looked like at 3:45 Thursday afternoon. The rain was south of us and moving fairly quickly towards us.

Here’s a later radar image.

The pushpin is our house. The rain is almost upon us. It’s 4:10, and it cannot possibly miss us. Here’s our front yard as the rain approaches.

The rain is visible, just on the other side of the ridge. The low clouds appear to just clear the ridge on the left, and the rain is coming down hard, hiding the sky and the land behind it. I put a row of straw bales at the bottom of the grassy part of the yard to try to slow the runoff that erodes our prepared area. It does almost nothing. The darker earth in the middle is where I sprinkled earlier.

And then, Like the Red Sea parted by Moses, the rain divides itself.
But maybe we can get a little, just the edge of the hard rain. That might be even better than having the heaviest part of the storm pass directly over us.

And then, at 4:45, Moses decides even a shallow sea is too deep.

Here is the radar at  4:50.

We got no rain at all. The green over our pushpin is rain so light it didn’t reach the ground.

It’s Friday night. The Atlanta weather forecasters are predicting two bands of rain for tonight and early Saturday morning. They show rain passing directly over us. Today I spread some straw lightly over most of the seeded area, as Walter Reeves recommends, hoping it will prevent the hoped-for rain from washing all our work away. By the time I get up Saturday morning, I’ll know whether I have to sprinkle the yard again, get another load of topsoil to replace everything that washed away, or (one hopes) sit back and admire the well-watered front yard.