Cleaning up at the Farm After Hurricane Ida
Clean-up continues today at my Bedford, New York farm after the remnants of Hurricane Ida barreled through the Northeast with furious, wind-driven rain, and flash flooding earlier this week.
It’s heartbreaking to see so many images of areas ravaged by this storm. In New York City, Ida halted train service, flooded apartments, and caused extensive travel delays. A record-breaking 3.1 inches of rain fell in Central Park within an hour. Tornado warnings were issued across parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Fortunately, my farm escaped major damage. There was extensive runoff on the carriage roads, a good number of young trees were pushed over by strong winds, and we lost several branches, but everything here can be fixed, and my outdoor grounds crew is working very hard to get things back into shape. If you were in Ida's path, I hope you and your families are safe.
Here are some photos.
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- Hurricane Ida whipped through the region overnight. By the next morning, all the streams at the farm were angry, full to overflowing, and several more dry stream beds were filled.
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- I have four miles of carriage road at the farm and many of them suffered stormwater runoff – generated from all the fast-moving rain that flowed over the roads and into the landscape – the gravel is everywhere.
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- After any storm, my gardeners and crew drive around the entire property to assess the damage. Here’s Ryan picking up a fallen branch in the middle of a woodland road. Branches are moved to the edge, where they can be picked up and chipped.
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- Here’s more of the eroded carriage road after the rains.
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- Here, Ryan is securing a kousa dogwood tree that was found toppled over after the storm. These young specimens are still quite fragile and need the support of bamboo uprights until it is older and more developed.
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- Cornus kousa is a small deciduous tree that can grow up to 40 feet tall. It is in the flowering plant family Cornaceae. Common names include kousa, kousa dogwood, Chinese dogwood, Korean dogwood, and Japanese dogwood. It is native to East Asia including Korea, China and Japan. This is a fruit of the kousa which is edible. The soft pulp is sweet with a similar flavor to a ripe persimmon but it also has hard seeds inside.
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- More branches are moved to the sides of the road ready for pick up at another time.
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- There were great puddles of water everywhere – the rain came down fast and furious. Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana as a category 4 storm with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour. Ida then churned inland, bringing catastrophic winds, heavy rainfall, and tornado watches, and life-threatening storm surge along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama before it moved north into our area bringing more torrential rains.
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- The combination of softened wood and high winds is so bad for fully leafed-out trees. This branch is broken and has to be completely removed.
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- Ryan braces the branch, so it stays still until it can be fully removed. Some are too heavy to carry and need to be cut into sections before feeding into the chipper.
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- Meanwhile, Brian carries another fallen branch to the side of the road. I can take fallen branches and boughs but broken and uprooted trees are so difficult to clean up and so sad to lose.
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- In the sycamore allee, many of my young London plane trees, Platanus × acerifolia, were left leaning, but all survived. They too have to be re-staked upright.
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- Many of these trees were leaning because the ground became so saturated from the rains.
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- Ryan digs the hole deeper and adds another stake to support the tree.
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- Now this tree is standing tall and straight once again – this time with two stakes.
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- And a doubled twine to secure them.
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- During strong rain storms, the water runoff sometimes washes the gravel off of this road by the azaleas and onto the grassy areas. We often place bales to help direct the rain water to the appropriate drains.
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- The rains were so strong that this bale came apart during the storm.
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- The low swales along the sides of the roads are a very good idea, as they prevent a lot of driveway erosion. A swale is a small channel that conveys water from one point to another. When planted with grasses or native vegetation, swales can be positioned to collect stormwater from driveways and other hard surfaces.
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- The Boxwood Allee drive suffered a lot of washout.
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- Chhiring adds soil and levels the gravel wherever the washout occurred.
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- But these are easy to fix after the storm – once fixed, it doesn’t even look as if a storm even hit this area of the allee.
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- Here is Pasang raking the washed out gravel back to the road where it belongs. There is still a lot of work to be done, but soon the farm will be back in good shape.
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- The storm left a mess in its wake, but everything at the farm can be repaired. My heart goes out to those who did not fare as well. Today is also expected to be very pleasant – mild temperatures, low humidity, and lots of sunshine. I hope those of you who suffered damage are doing okay and making headway with clean up chores.
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