Every year, in October, we get a massive dump of rain. If its been cold and there is still snow on the mountains, the heavy rain melts the snow, and we get floods.

This year the snow disappeared a few weeks back, so we won't get that double-whammy. But we might see still some flooding. The weather report has us receiving somewhere between 65mm and 160mm of rain in the next three days, with almost 100% certainty.

Heavy rain coming.....

The rain doesn't have to fall on us, of course, to create a flood. Mt Buffalo has been blitzed today, and has already received some 30mm of rain. That all comes downhill and a lot goes past us in the Ovens River.

Just below flood level.

From past years I expect we will be ok.

There are a few impacts from the rain. Fruit trees benefit from a full water table, but...In September and October almost all our trees flower. If they happen to be flowering during the week of heavy rain, the resultant crop is usually affected. This year the stone fruit and apples/pears have already flowered, so we might expect a bumper crop of them this year. We have massive pawlonia trees, which, oddly, produce only a few seed cases a year. I have been collecting the seed and propagating them. But the pawlonia is flowering right now, and I expect we will see very few fully formed seed cases this year.

Our olives flower in November. Not yet, thankfully, so we should be ok.

I am not, however, optimistic we'll have a heavy olive crop this year. We've been lucky with three good years in a row. The debate I had with myself about doing a late pick to get the remnant olives is coming back to bite me though. Unusually, those unpicked olives have remained on the tree, and that has suppressed new blossum forming for the next crop. I've been looking for blossum buds for a week or so, but not seen any. Then, yesterday, I noticed a tree covered in pre-blossum buds. I hadn't noticed this in the other trees...because there aren't any!

I've taken advantage of the heavy rain to get a few things kick-started. A month or so back we burnt off a massive stack of prunings. The sheep has eaten through them and left bare sticks. I bonfired it all, and created a 20 metre long burn scar. That's a good thing though....I stack the prunings where, say, there's an infestation of capeweed, or a bare spot with no grass. After the burn I put down grass seed, cover it with hay, and the rain does the rest. That project has worked, and thick grass is now covering the burn scar.

Last week before it got hot I also burnt off more pruning piles. These were severe prunings from lacebug affected trees. The idea was to prune back the trees, leave not much behind that could be easily sprayed, and burn the removed leaves. Again, the sheep had a go at them first, but there was actually so much they didn't eat it all. But all that is now gone, along with the lacebug that was on it. And this afternoon, in the pouring rain, I got those burnt patches covered in grass seed and hay. Once it stops raining it should be warm enough for the grass seed to kick into life.

The other pre-rain task I did was planting trees. In our far paddock I built an inner fence to create a tree-safe zone. I had this vision of a glorious row of trees running along the fenceline.
Its a tough place to get trees started. While not as hardcore mining spoil as the goose paddock, it is gravelly river sand mixed with mining spoil. Very little nutrition, or even basic soil, in it, and pretty much everything, bar the odd freak sapling, has died over a hot summer. Some have made it 18 months, but mist are dead within 6 months.

I haven't given up. Initially the ground was almost bare in this laneway. Now its thick with some beneficial grass and mixed weeds. So change is possible. But only about 10% of the trees I planted have stayed on.

I've tried a different approach.....More actual soil inserted into a planting hole, heavy mulching in a 60cm radius. I scalped the grass out of the planting radius so the sapling can get going without being strangled by competition. Mostly oaks, self-started from acorns from the tree that sits above the vegie garden. "Oak?!", you say. I'm ok with that. I have planted hundreds of native trees, and am converting one ruined paddock into a native tree area. The oaks have proven to be surprisingly tough under difficult conditions. And, everything else I have planted in that laneway has died.

And, more trees, shrubs, groundcovers etc around the goose's lake. That's a never-ending task......!

Post edit: We had more than 110mm over a couple of days. Monthly average for October is about 100mm. There were minor floods downstream. A lot of water pooling on the wet surface, but nothing we haven't seen a lot of in the last 12 months!