5 Inches of Rain in 24 Hours: Blessing or Curse?

Reader Contribution by Blythe Pelham
Published on July 6, 2017

To be honest, we fell just short of five inches. Our grand total was 4.7 inches of rain. It began with a gentle .35 overnight and then came in doses longer in duration with larger drops and more vigor. By the time we reached evening, we logged one dousing of 2.7 inches in a relatively short period of time.

However, Tropical Storm Cindy left us with some very happy fruit trees. Her breezes had calmed by the time she reached Ohio so we thankfully didn’t have any wind damage. Earlier in the week as I was planting some perennials near our home orchard, I noticed the ground under the mulch was fairly dry. This concerned me since our apple trees dropped their abundant fruit on the ground ahead of harvest last year due to an extended dry spell.

While I haven’t checked since Cindy blew through, I’m guessing that a lot of that rain soaked into the ground as a treat for our trees. After a normal rain (when the ground is more saturated), we have seepage running off our banks and into the street. Even though we had rainfalls of at least an inch during previous weeks, we didn’t see a lot of the water leaving our yard this time.

Some of our plants actually seemed to double in size overnight — including the cabbage, cucumbers, and sweet potato vines (see middle photo, sweet potatoes not pictured). All of our plants looked happy and healthy just a few days later. The only pooling that I noticed was the two inches of standing water in our fire pit (see bottom photo), and even that soaked in overnight.

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