We’ve still not had that much snow but we did get a lot of rain last night and, looking out the back this morning, had an unexpected pond in the back garden! Some of it was the volume of water (quite a few areas round Loughborough have suffered various degrees of flooding), some of it was the ground not being in a good state to soak it up (saturation and also probably frozen layers) and some was not helped because my water collection system wasn’t diverting excess water fast enough to keep up with the input level.

I’ve now set the feedpipe from the roof so most rainwater will go straight into the regular gutter rather than being diverted but we also manually bailed out quite a few buckets of water to bring the level down. It wasn’t across the whole garden but just the area at the bottom of the steps from the patio, which is lower than other areas. I’ll have to think about whether I can put some kind of drain in but, unless we get more heavy rain in the next day or two (Met Office says probably not – quite sunny but cold), it should be alright for now.