In the Wet Tropics, a whatever approach to gardening, and life, can be challenged by waterever weather – when the rain seems to go on forever. Well, yes, it is the Wet Tropics with a distinct wet or tropical monsoon season that is generally expected from about October to April. Rain, lots of rain, is part of our annual cycle.
It’s mid-June now, though, and today I heard a local primary producer remark that the clear sunny days of the dry season started last Monday. The 2023-2024 Northern Australian wet season, which was the ninth-wettest on record, just didn’t know when to stop. For my Scratch Patch garden, the rain was “very much above average”, as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology rather quaintly puts it.
When Severe Tropical Cyclone Jasper stalled over Cape York peninsula with two low pressure troughs to the east of it, we had a drop or two of rain. By the afternoon of 17 December 2023, the front of the Scratch Patch and the street, which according to published studies doesn’t flood, was inundated. In less than a week across our Shire, 3.2 metres of rain was recorded. Thinking the Patch was beyond the reach of flood waters, I had been flood smug. “It won’t happen here” is now “I’m expecting this again sometime“. Next wet season, I will be with my townsfolk filling my share of sandbags at the back of the council chambers – just in case.
Many in the region had much, much worse than a flooded garden. I won’t downplay the effects of the flooding but I will pause here to reflect on how much more I appreciate the life continuing in and beyond those well-watered beds.
